With a gift from an anonymous donor, the University has established an endowed professorship in honor of the late Howard McParlin Davis, a longtime Columbia teacher of Renaissance art.
The Howard McP. Davis Professorship of Art History will support a Columbia art historian of European art and architecture in the period from 1300 to 1700.
Davis, who passed away in 1994, was a beloved professor to Columbia graduate and undergraduate students for more than four decades. He received several teaching awards, including Columbia’s Mark Van Doren Award in 1968 and the Great Teacher Award of the Society of Older Graduates of Columbia in 1970. A 1984 New York Times article about his retirement that year called him “one of the finest teachers of art history in the country.”
The donor, one of Davis’s former students, seeks to honor his legacy of rigorous teaching.
Michael Cole, the chair of Columbia’s art history and archaeology department and a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque European art, will be the first recipient of the Davis Professorship.
Cole, who joined Columbia in 2010, is widely considered the leading American scholar of his generation in Renaissance art history.
“I am honored to hold a chair named in memory of such an admired figure,” he says.
