Dr. R. Chris Davis

Professional Background

R. Chris Davis received his PhD in modern history (2013) and MSt in historical research (2006) from the University of Oxford, an MA in cultural studies (2004) from Jagiellonian University, Krakow (2004), and a BA in English (1999) from the University of St. Thomas, Houston. Currently he is a Professor of History and Humanities at Lone Star College, Houston. He has also worked as a research assistant at the European Studies Centre at St Antony's College, University of Oxford and taught as a visiting lecturer at Romania's National School of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest. Prior to his graduate studies, Dr. Davis served two years in the US Peace Corps in Romania. His scholarship and teaching have been supported by Fulbright, American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), and International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) grants and fellowships. In addition, Dr. Davis  was a research fellow at both the Centre for Advanced Study (Sofia, Bulgaria) and New Europe College (Bucharest, Romania); and a consultant and editor for several research projects and working groups in east central Europe, including the European Network for Research and Cooperation on Roma (Gypsy) Issues. Since 2013, he has served as the book reviews editor for H-Romania, an H-Net (Humanities & Social Sciences Online) Network.

Dr. Davis’s research interests include the cultures and histories of central and eastern Europe, with a focus on minorities, religion, and historiography. His 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.”

Fellowship Research

R. Chris Davis was awarded a Broadening Academia Initiative Hybrid Fellowship for his research project, “The Life, Martyrdom, and Death Cult of Fascist Ion Motza in Interwar Europe.” This project uses the representative biography of Romanian activist Ion Motza (1902– 1937) to tell the story of how a Sorbonne-educated lawyer became a notorious fascist, criminal, and martyr in interwar Europe. Motza co-led Romania’s ultranationalist Legion of the Archangel Michael, helped assassinate numerous Romanian politicians in the 1930s, and died fighting for Franco’s Spanish Foreign Legion in the Spanish Civil War.

The project aims to internationalize the local but seminal events centered on an otherwise obscure Romanian life story, resituating an east-central European biography within a broader, transnational history of the Holocaust. It will place the lives and activities of Motza and his contemporaries in a broader historical, geographical, and even professional context, prising open a simple but essential question: What do their education and travels, particularly abroad in western and central Europe during the 1930s, tell us about their future lives as fascists and anti-Semites who would lay the ideological groundwork for the Holocaust in World War II? 

This fellowship allows Dr. Davis to use the archival collections of the USHMM, notably the various Romanian government ministries from the 1930s and 40s, as well as the document and publication holdings on the Spanish Civil War. The funding will facilitate archival and other research for a biography of Ion Motza, to be published as an academic monograph, as well as a journal article. Dr. Davis’s research at USHMM aims to widen the scope of Holocaust studies in Romania by examining how individuals were radicalized abroad, particularly as students in the legal profession, and explore how their willingness to fight and die for another country’s fascism in the 1930s inspired, bolstered, and legitimized the politics enabling the Holocaust back home in the 1940s.

Fellowship Period: November 1, 2024–April 30, 2025