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, 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 public and peer-reviewed writing has appeared in venues such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Somatosphere, Anthropology News, and AES. Since 2012, her work in Cameroon 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, 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. She is involved with Michigan's 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.
