Interests
Greece, Cyprus, Turkey; Europe, the Mediterranean, the Levant; medicine and psychology, history and memory, ethics and subjectivity, film and visual culture, anthropology of the state, anthropology of knowledge and expertise, anthropology of death, sensory anthropology, ethnographic methods.  

Short Bio
Elizabeth Davis is Professor of Anthropology. Her research and writing, grounded in the European horizons and the Ottoman history of the Greek-speaking world, focus on the intersections of psyche, body, history, and power. Her particular interest is in how the ties that bind people to communities and states are yielded and inflected by knowledge: that is, how expert and subaltern epistemologies mediate conceptions of self and others. Her first book, Bad Souls: Madness and Responsibility in Modern Greece (Duke University Press, 2012), is an ethnographic study of responsibility among psychiatric patients and their caregivers in the borderlands between Greece and Turkey. She has also written two books based on ethnographic and archival research in Cyprus. The first, Artifactual: Forensic and Documentary Knowing (Duke University Press, 2023), addresses public secrecy and knowledge projects about the violence of the 1960s-70s that led to the enduring division of Cyprus, including forensic investigations, visual archives, and documentary film. The second, The Time of the Cannibals: On Conspiracy Theory and Context (Fordham University Press, 2024), takes Cyprus as a context for rethinking conspiracy theory and political theology.

Beyond these projects, Davis has written on economic crisis and suicide in Greece, body doubles and body politics, and identity play in documentary and ethnographic methodologies. She is currently studying orthodox and heterodox death practices in and beyond Greece. She is also making a documentary film, Immortal, addressing the public life of sacred bones in Cyprus. 

Davis was Associate Editor for Social Sciences at the Journal of Modern Greek Studies from 2012-2019 and has served two terms on the Executive Board of the Modern Greek Studies Association. At Princeton, she serves on the Executive Committees of the Program in Hellenic Studies, the Humanities Council, and the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities (IHUM). She is a Faculty Associate of the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, and she has been a Faculty Associate of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) since 2011. In spring 2025, she will serve as Acting Director of the Behrman Undergraduate Society of Fellows.