This article is part of an ongoing series spotlighting assistant professors in the anthropology department.

Go to office hours, says Elizabeth Durham: it could change your life. The U-M anthro assistant professor and Michigan Society Fellow discovered a country and research area of specialization through a professor she had as an undergrad at Carleton College. Durham planned on being pre-med and majoring in chemistry, but after taking an Intro to Anthropology course as a freshman her focus shifted to medical anthropology. 

“I realized what I wanted to do in medicine and health was unpack those broader structural and social issues, not so much hunker down in the lab,” Durham said. “I changed my major almost overnight and I’ve never looked back.” 

Before committing to years of higher education, though, she wanted to make sure field research was for her. She talked it over with a favorite professor who had worked for decades in the Republic of Cameroon. That professor recommended Durham apply for a Fulbright scholarship to conduct research in Cameroon because of the opportunity to form connections with a local supervisor and sponsor institution. Durham spent nine months in western Cameroon studying HIV/AIDS treatment and policy. 

When she ultimately decided to pursue her Ph.D., a relatively new global mental health campaign was in its heyday, which led Durham to the fields of psychiatry and mental health care. As it happened, Cameroon’s flagship public psychiatric hospital was looking for an anthropologist to join their clinical team to study the downstream effects of the country’s mental health care system reforms. 

“Cameroon was one of many countries in the mid-2010s to get interested in global mental health and to change the healthcare system in accordance with the best practice recommendations of that campaign,” Durham explained. “[It] was a really interesting moment in Cameroonian healthcare and reforms to public healthcare.” 

Durham has been working in Cameroon in various capacities ever since. Her research/current book project (State-Sanctioned Sanity: Public Psychiatry and the Therapeutic Politics of Escape in the Republic of Cameroon) focuses on the provision and experience of secular state psychiatric services in a period of rising armed conflict among the Republic and secessionist factions. 

“My research looks at how the Cameroonian government mobilized psychiatry — particularly biomedical psychiatry or brain-based psychiatry — to incentivize citizenship in the context of Cameroon’s secessionist war,” Durham said. “I’m interested in how institutions of care, including the state and public health institutions, frame certain ways of relating to space and time as ‘healthy,’ and how other more subversive forms of movement can produce alternate possibilities of health and political life.” 

At U-M, Durham is involved with several other campus units. Through the African Studies Center, she is the faculty host to a Cameroonian anthropologist this semester and looks forward to hosting her longtime colleague as she was hosted for years. Durham is also affiliated with the Center for Global Health Equity and the Science, Technology, and Society program (STS), helping to coordinate STS’ grad student symposium and STeMS speaker series. 

“I think a lot of times when we talk about interdisciplinary programs, the society side is dominated by the science and technology side. It’s nice to be in those spaces as an anthropologist, pushing for a robust understanding of the social and why it matters to technology or to science,” Durham said. 

Her favorite course to teach has been her small seminar, “Anthropology of Mental Health, Illness, and Psychopharmaceuticals” (ANTHRCUL 298). 

“It had a really good range of seniors to sophomores. I had anthropology majors, but I also had folks from biology, health, and society,” she recalled. “When you get that interdisciplinarity in an undergraduate class, it can lead to really generative discussions. A lot of times, younger generations of students are already so fluent in the language of self-care or mental health diagnoses, so they come in enthusiastic. It's a great origin point for a class.” 

Durham welcomes the opportunity to practice and model mentorship — after all, it was integral to her own educational and professional development — and encourages students to seek out mentors among their instructors. 

“Get to know your professors. U-M is a huge university, I do understand, and I have taught those classes with hundreds of students and multiple GSIs. It can be hard to get to know professors and develop that more personal relationship. But we hold office hours for a reason. Sometimes students have the misconception that office hours are a place of distress or discipline, and that’s not the case at all. Even if you just want to talk to us about an article that you read or a question that you have, it can be low stakes. We love to get to know you, where you’re coming from, what you’re interested in, where you see yourself going once you leave U-M.”

I share with Durham that, as someone who did not take advantage of office hours enough as a student, I wholeheartedly agree with her advice. She added, “I will say, the onus is on us as faculty to make ourselves available to students. It’s on us to make our office hours inviting, to make our classroom inviting. But genuinely, we want to meet you. Come find us. You never know what might change based on that conversation or that relationship.”

She would know.

Quick Q&A with Elizabeth Durham

Favorite Ann Arbor spot? I have become a huge fan of Matthaei Botanical Gardens. I walk my daughter a lot there.

What are you reading these days? I’ve been reading some interesting work on fugitivity in anthropology. And baby board books! 

Listening to? My daughter has developed a love of ragtime. I don’t know how, because we don’t listen to ragtime around the house, but she’s a little Scott Joplin baby!