James Earl Davis, Ph.D.

About James Earl Davis, Ph.D.

Professor, College of Education
Temple University

James Earl Davis is a professor in the College of Education at Temple University with primary appointments in higher education and urban education. Professor Davis holds secondary faculty appointments in the Department of African American Studies and the Women Studies Program. He also serves as a senior research associate at the National Center on Fathers and Families, an interdisciplinary policy research center in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests focus on urban education policy, sociology of education, equity and access to higher education, and gender studies. Specifically, Dr. Davis has investigated the influence of social contexts of learning—including school, family, and community settings—with a concern for how gender and race inform students’ achievement and engagement outcomes, particularly among young Black men. His work has appeared in numerous academic journals, including Gender & Society, Urban Education, Educational Researcher, Youth & Society, American Journal of Evaluation, Review of Research in Education, and Race Ethnicity and Education. Dr. Davis earned his B.A. in sociology from Morehouse College in Athens, GA, and his Ph.D. in social policy and evaluation from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. A former National Academy of Education postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Davis has been a faculty member at the University of Delaware and Cornell University. He has also served as visiting scholar in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan. His research and evaluation studies have been funded by the National Science Foundation, Spencer Foundation, William Penn Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Education. He recently served three years as the interim dean of Temple’s College of Education, and is currently the principal investigator on a National Science Foundation (Research on Gender in Science and Engineering Program) project, STEMing the Tide: Exploring Factors Related to Males of Color Interest, Engagement and Achievement in Mathematics and Science. In 2003, he received the American Evaluation Association (Ethnic Participation in Evaluation) Distinguished Service Award, and in 2010 he received the award for American Educational Research Association Distinguished Editorial Service.