Assistant Professor, Anthropology
About
Elizabeth Durham (she/her) is a medical and political anthropologist. Her research interests include the Global Mental Health campaign, psychiatry, psychopharmaceuticals, substance use, trauma, Pentecostalism, the politics of escape and of time, daydreaming, and the practice and ethics of social science in clinical and humanitarian settings.
Elizabeth came to Michigan in 2022. Her current book project, entitled State-Sanctioned Sanity: Public Psychiatry and the Therapeutic Politics of Escape in the Republic of Cameroon, is an ethnography of the provision and experience of secular state psychiatric services in a period of rising Pentecostal adherence and armed conflict among the Republic and secessionist factions. Her other recent writing features in Anthropological Quarterly (2024), Social Science & Medicine - Mental Health (2024), AES (2023), Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2021), Anthropology News (2021), and Somatosphere (2020a, 2020b, 2016). Since 2012, her work in Cameroon has been publicly supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program and the Fulbright-IIE Program, and privately supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Fund.
At Michigan, Elizabeth teaches courses on medical anthropology and the anthropology of mental health, illness, and psychopharmaceuticals (on teaching leave in 2024-2025). She is involved with Michigan's Center for Global Health Equity, the Science, Technology, and Society Program, and the African Studies Center, including serving as a faculty host for the African Presidential Scholars Program. In the Republic of Cameroon, she is affiliated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Yaoundé I and with the Center for Population Studies and Health Promotion, also in Yaoundé.
