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Andrew Davis
Dean, Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts
Professor of Music

Andrew Davis is the Founding Dean of the Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts. He has been on the faculty of the Moores School of Music since 2003. He was previously Director of the Moores School of Music, Director of Graduate Studies in the Moores School of Music and an Associate Dean in the Honors College at the University of Houston. He holds a faculty appointment in the Moores School of Music as a music theorist, and he holds an appointment on the faculty of the Honors College.

As a researcher, Davis studies music of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He authored the 2010 book Il Trittico, Turandot, and Puccini’s Late Style (Indiana University Press), and he is the author of a forthcoming book, Fragments: Romanticism and Musical Narrative in the Piano Sonatas of Brahms, Chopin, and Schumann, focused on rhetoric and narrative in the nineteenth-century sonata repertoire. He has published and delivered presentations nationally and internationally on the works of Brahms, Chopin, Liszt, Puccini, Strauss and Gershwin.

At the University of Houston, Davis was co-chair (with Honors College Dean William Monroe) of the university-wide committee charged with bringing a chapter of the prestigious honor society Phi Beta Kappa to the University of Houston. He was named a Fellow of the Honors College in 2010, and he earned a 2010 University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award. He has twice been nominated for the Ross M. Lence Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities.

In the profession and in the community at large, Davis serves as the treasurer for the Texas Society for Music Theory and as president of the Houston chapter of the national music honor society Pi Kappa Lambda. He is an active member of the National Association of Schools of Music, including that organization’s team of members that recommend accreditation actions for schools of music nationwide. He is secretary of the board of directors of the Phi Beta Kappa Alumni Association of Greater Houston, and he serves on the board of directors of the Immanuel and Helen B. Olshan Foundation in Houston.

Davis holds the Ph.D. in music theory from Indiana University, an MM in music theory from the University of Massachusetts, and a BA in music (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and with a certificate in saxophone performance and a minor and honors in Geography) from the Pennsylvania State University.