About Me

I am a native Texan, born in Houston and raised in Humble. I earned a BA in English from the University of St Thomas, then served two years in the Peace Corps in Romania. After completing my Peace Corps service, I studied at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, where I earned an MA in Cultural Studies. I continued my graduate work at the University of Oxford, St Antony’s College, where I earned an MSt in Historical Research and a PhD in Modern History.

Instructor Berlin Pic

In 2015 was hired full-time in the History Department at Lone Star College. Over the years, I have taught Intro to Humanities (HUMA 1301 & 1302), World History (HIST 2321 & 2322), and U.S. History (HIST 1301 & 1302). I have also taught as a visiting lecturer at Romania’s National School of Political Studies and Public Administration, in Bucharest.

My current research interests include the cultures and histories of central and eastern Europe, with a focus on minorities, religion, and historiography. My book Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood: A Minority’s Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–45, published by the University of Wisconsin Press (2019), won the Association for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies’ Barbara Jelavich Book Prize for “distinguished monograph published on any aspect of Southeast European or Habsburg studies since 1600, or nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ottoman or Russian diplomatic history.”

My scholarship has been supported by grants and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Commission, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX), among others. I have also worked as a research assistant at the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, Univ. of Oxford; a research fellow at both the Centre for Advanced Study (Sofia, Bulgaria) and New Europe College (Bucharest, Romania); and a consultant and editor for a number of research projects and working groups in east central Europe, including the European Network for Research and Cooperation on Roma (Gypsy) Issues.

Since 2013, I have served as the book-reviews editor for H-Romania, an H-Net (Humanities & Social Sciences Online) Network, and as a board member for the Society for Romanian Studies. I am also the president of the Humble Museum. In 2016, I was awarded a Chancellor’s Faculty Technology Innovation Grant to establish the LSC Center for Local & Oral History. In 2017 I received the Innovator of the Year Award at LSC-Kingwood, and in 2019 I was honored with a Faculty Excellence Award. As of spring 2023, I am serving as the Faculty Senate President for LSC-Online.

For more info about my research and scholarship, including my CV and links to some of my publications, please visit my Academia.edu page at https://lscs.academia.edu/RChrisDavis.

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