Dr. Charles H. F. Davis III is quickly becoming one of the nation’s most prominent scholars. With a bold research agenda that looks at the intersectional politics of identity and systemic oppression, he specifically focuses on contemporary student social movements in college.
Davis “is the most serious, creative and intellectually gifted scholar with whom I have had the pleasure of working over the course of my 16-year faculty career,” says Dr. Shaun R. Harper, the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and the founder and executive director of the USC Race and Equity Center.
The two met in 2009 when Davis — a two-time alumnus of Florida State University (FSU) — arrived at the University of Pennsylvania as a master’s student.
“He was the very best student in my Race in Education course that year,” remembers Harper, who has collaborated with Davis throughout the years, hiring him in 2014 as director of Higher Education Research and Initiatives at the Penn Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
When Harper left Penn in 2017 to launch the USC Race and Equity Center, Davis followed and was hired as a clinical assistant professor — a non-tenure-track teaching position — in the Rossier School of Education with an administrative appointment as chief strategy officer and director of research at the Race and Equity Center, a job that he has held for two years.
Davis is now on the job market, winding down his time at USC and hoping to gain a tenure-track teaching position at a university.
The former high school music teacher started thinking about a career in higher education during his undergraduate years at FSU. His passion for education was passed on from his mother, a longtime educator, and his grandmother, who served as a librarian for more than 30 years. He was also mentored by the late Dr. Lee Jones, a well-known higher education administrator who founded the Brothers of the Academy (BOTA) Institute.
