Mary Davis

Mary Davis is a historian and educator specializing in fashion and its relationship to art and commerce. In a wide-ranging career, she has held positions as a professor and dean as well as posts with the President’s Commission on Organized Crime and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. She is currently a member of the Capstone Faculty at the Jackson School of Global Affairs and a Faculty Affiliate at the Center for Business and the Environment at Yale University. 

She recently published the book Paul Poiret: Inventing Modern Luxury (Reaktion, 2025) and is the author of Ballets Russes Style: Diaghilev’s Dancers and Paris Fashion (Reaktion, 2010), Erik Satie (Reaktion, 2008), and Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (University of California Press, 2006). 

Davis earned Ph.D. and A.M. degrees in Musicology from Harvard University, where she was a Whiting Fellow.  She also holds an M.A. in Musicology from the New England Conservatory of Music and an M.M. in Piano from the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.  She earned her undergraduate degree in Music (magna cum laude) from St. Mary’s College at Notre Dame.