Elizabeth A. Durham

Elizabeth Durham (she/her) is a medical and political anthropologist. Her research interests include the Global Mental Health campaign, psychiatry, psychopharmaceuticals, alcohol, trauma, Pentecostalism, the politics of escape and of time, maladaptive daydreaming, and the practice and ethics of social science in clinical and humanitarian settings. Outside the academy, she provides country-of-origin expertise for health-centered refugee and asylum cases and is represented by Communitology. 

Elizabeth came to Michigan in 2022 and is working on her first book. Tentatively titled Minding Time: Mental Health and Everyday Life in the Republic of Cameroon, her ethnography draws on fieldwork anchored at the Republic's flagship state psychiatric hospital. Her manuscript examines how patients learned to relate the management of time to the pursuit of mental health, and to navigate upon discharge competing frameworks of time and health in clinical, religious, and political venues across the capital, Yaoundé, and the Republic itself in a period of armed secessionist conflict. Her work has appeared in venues such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly and Somatosphere, and has been publicly supported by the Fulbright-Hays Program in the U.S. Department of Education and the Fulbright-IIE Program in the U.S. Department of State. Her research has also been privately supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Fund.

At the University of Michigan, Elizabeth is involved with the Center for Global Health Equity, the Science, Technology, and Society Program, and the African Studies Center. 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.