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KINGSLEY DAVIS
(20 August 1908–27 February 1997)
Stanford University
KINGSLEY DAVIS
(20 August 1908–27 February 1997)
K
ingsley Davis was one of the outstanding demographers and sociologists of this century. Born in Tuxedo, Texas, 20 August 1908,
he received a B.A. in English in 1930 and an M.A. in philosophy in
1932 from the University of Texas, then an M.A. in 1933 and a Ph.D. in
1936 in sociology from Harvard. He taught at Smith College 1934–36
and at Clark University in 1936–37. He was head of the Division of Sociology at Penn State in 1937–40. In 1940, he received a postdoctoral
fellowship from the Social Science Research Council to study demography, and divided his time between studying at the University of Chicago, conducting a fertility survey in Puerto Rico, and working at the
Bureau of the Census. In 1942, on leave from Penn State, he spent a
year as a visiting research associate at the Office of Population Research at Princeton. In 1944, retaining his affiliation as a research associate at the OPR, he was given an appointment as associate professor of
public affairs. In 1945, he received the title associate professor of sociology and anthropology, in a department he founded. The department
had the special support of Frank Notestein, the director of the OPR,
who had invited Kingsley to Princeton. The new department recruited
Wilbert Moore, Paul Hatt, Marion Levy, and Mel Tumin, among others,
and the department remains among the national leaders.
In 1948 Kingsley accepted a position in the graduate faculty of
political science at Columbia. While at Columbia, he was associate professor and professor of sociology, and associate director and director of
the Bureau of Applied Social Research. In 1955 he moved to Berkeley
as professor of sociology. He was chairman of the Department of Sociology, founded a program in international population and urban
research, and helped establish the Berkeley department of demography.
In 1977 he was appointed distinguished professor of sociology at the
University of Southern California in Los Angeles, and in 1981 he
received a part-time appointment as a senior research fellow at the
Hoover Institution at Stanford.
In addition to these academic activities, in which he has contributed so much to the success of creative institutions, Kingsley had an
PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 143, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 1999
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BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS
extraordinary record of original and influential research. He began
prolifically while at Princeton in the 1940s. The Office of Population
Research undertook a study of population change in a number of
European countries under the impetus of the League of Nations. (The
Economic, Financial, and Transit Department of the League had located
in Princeton during the war, and arranged for the OPR to make population studies that might be useful in postwar peace negotiations.) In
1945, the Office of the Geographer of the Department of State made a
contract with the OPR to extend the work on Europe to Asia. This contract supplied the support for Kingsley’s research that produced a monumental book, The Population of India and Pakistan, the standard
source of information and analysis of the population of the subcontinent from 1880 to 1940. In the same period he wrote a notable nondemographic book entitled Human Society. He also played a prominent
role in the development and naming of the Demographic Transition.
Davis continued the production of original, useful, and influential
research in several additional books, and very many articles and book
chapters. His published research output makes him one of the most
outstanding social scientists of the twentieth century.
Elected 1960
Ansley J. Coale
Senior Research Demographer
Professor of Economics
and Public Affairs, Emeritus
Princeton University