Rebecca Miller Davis

Rebecca Miller Davis
Teaching Professor of History
Faculty Mentor
Humanities and Social Sciences

Contact Info
816-235-6118 x 2
222B Cockefair Hall
American History, race, media, Social Justice, the New South, and Digital and Public Humanities

About

Professor Rebecca Miller Davis is a social and political historian of modern American history with research and teaching interests in race, media, social justice, and the New South. She teaches the department’s American history surveys; courses in the UMKC Essentials General Education curriculum; the department’s historiography and research methods course; upper-level and graduate history courses in Black history, the 1960s, and World War II film and propaganda; as well as the graduate colloquium readings course. She is the history department’s Major Academic Path (MAP)/Faculty Mentor and she works with the High School College Partnership (HSCP) program to facilitate dual-credit courses taught in partnering high schools. As a certified teacher herself, Dr. Davis is the department contact for School of Education students interested in a history major/minor as they pursue a career as a social studies teacher.


Dr. Davis earned her Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina in 2011 and came to UMKC in 2012. She was awarded the UMKC Online Course of the Year in 2015, the College of Arts and Sciences' Outstanding Teaching Award for NTT Faculty in 2016, Faculty Ally of the Year by the campus organization Men of Color in 2016, and the Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2020. She is the co-editor of a digital project on Kansas City activism and authored various articles and essays on race, education, and politics. Dr. Davis is working on her first book with the University of Georgia Press dealing with Mississippi press coverage of the Black freedom struggle.

Courses

Undergraduate:

  • GECDV 205 - Race in American Film 
  • GECDV 210 - We Shall (All) Overcome: Civil Rights Movements in Contemporary America 
  • HISTORY 101 - U.S. History to 1877
  • HISTORY 102 - U.S. History Since 1877
  • HISTORY 300WY - Decade of Dissent: The 1960s 
  • HISTORY 301WI - Historiography and Method 
  • HISTORY 309 - World War II Film and Propaganda 
  • HISTORY 398 - Black Civil Rights in the 20th and 21st Centuries 

Graduate:

  • HISTORY 5558 - Black Civil Rights in the 20th and 21st Centuries 
  • HISTORY 5559 - World War II Film and Propaganda 
  • HISTORY 5585GR - Colloquium in U.S. History 

Academic Credentials

B.A. History (Minor in Secondary Education), James Madison University (2001)
M.A. History, James Madison University (2003)
Ph.D. History, University of South Carolina (2011)