Prof. Joshua Davis Named 2022-23 NEH Public Scholar, Wins 2022 Silvers Grant for Work in Progress
September 19, 2022
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Joshua Clark Davis, associate professor of history in The University of Baltimore's Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, is the recipient of a 2022-23 Public Scholar grant award from the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH). The NEH Public Scholars program "supports the creation of well-researched nonfiction books in the humanities written for the broad public." Prof. Davis was selected for his book project, Police Against the Movement: The Forgotten Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle, which is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. The grant will allow Prof. Davis to take a year-long sabbatical to complete his book, which focuses on the policing of 20th-century civil rights activism, activist efforts to effect police reform, and strategic responses by some urban policing agencies.
Prof. Davis also has been named a 2022 Silvers Grant recipient for the same book project. Established in 2019 and awarded in honor of Robert B. Silvers, a founding editor of the New York Review of Books, the Silvers Grants for Work in Progress are awarded annually "to support writers working on long-form essays or full-length book projects in the fields of literary and arts criticism, political analysis, and social reportage."
Prof. Davis is a public historian who teaches and researches broadly in 20th-century U.S. history with a focus on African American history, capitalism, policing, social movements and urban history. In 2017 he published his first book, From Head Shops to Whole Foods, which explores how organic food stores, feminist enterprises, Black bookstores and other businesses emerged from social movements and countercultures of the 1960s and '70s. Additionally, his work has been featured in Time, Slate, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and USA Today.
Learn more about Prof. Davis and The University of Baltimore's program in History.
Learn more about the NEH grant awards and the Silvers Grants.