Elizabeth A. Davis
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Socio-Cultural Anthropology, University of California-Berkeley, 2005
122 Aaron Burr Hall
(609) 258-8864
ead@princeton.edu
interests
Greece and Cyprus, medicine and psychology, ethics and subjectivity, peace and conflict, migration and borderlands, law and empire, history and memory, film and visual culture, social theory and ethnography, methods.
short bio
Elizabeth Davis is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, in association with Hellenic Studies. She is also affiliated with the Program in Global Health and Health Policy, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Before joining the Princeton faculty in 2009, she taught in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, and held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Society of Fellows at Columbia University. Her work in Greece and Cyprus addresses the psyche and the body, their implication in social conflict and in the ties that bind people to communities and states. Her book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece, explores humanitarian psychiatric reform in the borderland between Greece and Turkey. She is currently conducting field research on political secrecy, transparency, and post-conflict statecraft in Cyprus, focusing on knowledge production about the violence of the 1960s-70s in the domains of forensic science, “conspiracy theory,” and archival documentation. This project entails ethnographic research on both sides of the newly-porous border between north and south, as well as a documentary film on suspicion, memory, and belonging.
recent publications
2010. “The Antisocial Profile: Deception and Intimacy in Greek Psychiatry,” Cultural Anthropology 25 (1): 130-164.
in press. Bad Souls (Κακόψυχοι): Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece. Durham: Duke University Press.