Davidson, Chandler

Chandler Davidson, Research Professor and Tsanoff Chair of Public Affairs Emeritus, taught at Rice from 1966 to 2003 and still occasionally teaches despite his emeritus status. He was a founding member of the Department of Sociology and served as departmental chair for fourteen years between 1979 and 2003. In the latter part of his career, he had a joint appointment with the Department of Political Science. Davidson has won five university-wide teaching prizes, including Rice's top award, the George R. Brown Excellence in Teaching Prize. In addition to many articles appearing in academic journals and popular magazines, he has written or edited a number of books. In the early 1990s he and Professor Bernard Grofman of the University of California at Irvine directed a major scholarly effort to assess the impact of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 in the South. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, the project involved almost thirty political scientists, historians, sociologists, and voting rights lawyers. The resulting book, "Quiet Revolution in the South" (Princeton University Press, 1994), was co-edited by Davidson and Grofman and won the Richard Fenno Prize awarded by the American Political Science Association for the best book published on legislative behavior that year. Davidson's work on voting rights has been cited several times in U.S. Supreme Court opinions. He is writing a book on hierarchies of respect in America. He is also continuing research on minority voting rights.