Rate My Professor Charles T. Davis

Charles T. Davis served as Assistant Professor of English at Princeton University from 1955 to 1961, becoming the first Black professor appointed to the faculty in the university’s history. He earned an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 1939, an A.M. from the University of Chicago in 1942, and a Ph.D. from New York University in 1951. Before joining Princeton, Davis taught at New York University. Following his appointment at Princeton, he held positions as associate professor and later full professor at Pennsylvania State University, where he founded the African American Studies program; professor of English at the University of Iowa from 1970 to 1976; and professor of English at Yale University beginning in 1976, where he became the first African American granted tenure in the English department and served as chair of the Afro-American Studies program. Davis’s scholarly contributions centered on American literature, with early work on poets such as Walt Whitman and E. A. Robinson, and later emphasis on African-American literature and culture. Among his key publications are the co-edited volume Walt Whitman’s Poems: Selections with Critical Aids (1955) and, posthumously, Black Is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981 (1982) and the co-edited The Slave’s Narrative (1985). He received a Fulbright professorship at the University of Turin in 1966-67 and a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship. Davis played a significant role in advancing the academic study of African-American literature and mentored emerging scholars in the field.

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