THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Allison Davis Lectures
The Allison Davis Lecture celebrates the work and life of Professor Allison Davis, the first African American to hold a full faculty position at a major predominately white university when he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. An educator, social anthropologist, and psychologist, Davis graduated as valedictorian from the historic Dunbar High School in Washington before attending Williams College. He went on to receive an MA in English and another in Anthropology from Harvard University. He completed a PhD in Anthropology at the University of Chicago in 1942 and was immediately hired in a tenure track position in the Department of Education. He became a full professor in 1948.
In works such as Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940) and Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941), Davis engaged in collaborative and interdisciplinary research that tracked the role of race and class in education and documented the economic, racial, and cultural character of the Jim Crow South. A pioneering ethnographer with an emphasis on social psychology, Davis is best known for his research on the relationship between child development and academic performance, which also challenged the biases of intelligence tests. Davis’s research in this area led to several cities including Chicago, New York, and San Francisco abolishing the use of such tests.
Davis’s interdisciplinary scholarship and his commitment to research with social and political impact are part of the long intellectual genealogy from which the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity draws inspiration.
Allison Davis Lectures
2026: Mae Ngai — “Once We Were Somebodies”: Refugees, History, and the Human
Thursday, April 23, 2026
2025: Dr. Shailaja Paik — “Radical Dalit Humanism: Towards Anti-caste, Anti-race, and Anti-patriarchal Futures”
Thursday, May 15, 2025