Hi! 👋 I am an architectural historian broadly interested in plant-human interaction. Recent research has considered histories of agribusiness, resettlement, resistance, and the plantation system through the material records of architecture and land.

At the Academy of Architecture, Università della Svizzera italiana I am jointly appointed at the Institute of the History and Theory of Art and Architecture (ISA); and the Institute of Urban and Landscape Studies (ISUP), where I lead the SNSF Ambizione project, Voyaging Vapors: Plant Histories of Plantation Architectures (2024–2028, project number 216182).

I completed my PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2021, and my dissertation project, Palm Politics: Warfare, Folklore, and Architecture, won the Society of Architectural Historians David B. Brownlee Award. I was recently a Princeton Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University (2022–23), and am an Associate of the Science, Technology, and Society Cluster at the Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore.

I am also a contributing editor to ARDETH Journal (Turin, Italy), and a founding member of ANZA East Africa (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania).

You can contact me at: will.davis@usi.ch

Link to my ORCID iD