Elizabeth Durham

Elizabeth Durham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows.  She earned her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in the spring of 2022.

At Michigan, Elizabeth will teach ANTHRCUL 344: Medical Anthropology, which is cross-listed with STS. She is also working on her first book, tentatively titled Minding Time: Healthy Living Amid the Clinic, the Church, and the Home(land) in the Republic of Cameroon. Grounded in two years of fieldwork at the Republic's flagship public psychiatric hospital, her manuscript examines how psychiatric 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 city. As part of this examination, she draws on STS (and also engages its critics) to consider how psychopharmaceuticals were both claimed and contested by patients, families, and clinicians as vital agents of patients' mental health.

Elizabeth's work has appeared in venues such as Medical Anthropology Quarterly and Somatosphere, and has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Fund.