Jenny L. Davis

Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Associate Professor of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the American Indian Studies Program and co-director of the Center for Indigenous Science. She is the co-editor of the Studies in Language and Gender series at Oxford University Press.

Her research interests sit at the intersections of Indigenous language futurism (including language reclamation & revitalization); Queer Indigenous Studies; Speculative fiction and poetry; NAGPRA & repatriation; and Indigenous, anti-colonial, collaborative, and community-based methods. Her research has been published in the Annual Review of Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Gender & Language, Language & Communication, Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals, the American Journal of Biological Anthropology, and The Routledge Companion to Publicly Engaged Humanities Scholarship, among others. Her 2022 poetry manuscript, Trickster Academy, was published in the University of Arizona Press Sun Tracks Series, and her creative work has most recently been published in SAPIENS;Transmotion; Anomaly; Santa Ana River Review; Broadsided; North Dakota Quarterly; Yellow Medicine Review; As/Us; Raven Chronicles; and Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and is forthcoming in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal; Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism; and Gathering in the Glittering Field: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry.

She is the recipient of two book prizes: the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance (University of Arizona Press, 2018) and the 2014 Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association for her co-edited volume Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, 2014). In 2021, she received the Dynamic Woman of the Year Award from the Chickasaw Nation, which is given annually for significant contributions to the Chickasaw Nation and its people through community engagement and work preserving its linguistic and cultural heritage.

In her administrative and service roles at UIUC, she has developed the Native American and Indigenous Language (NAIL) Lab and the Center for Indigenous Science, and works toward the repatriation, co-curation, and care of Indigenous collections (osteological, archaeological, ethnographic, and archival) in both the United States and international contexts. From 2019-2022 she served as the Chancellor's Fellow of Indigenous Research & Ethics. In that role, she worked to develop initiatives, including a campus-wide NAGPRA office and Tribal Liaison postion, to ensure that the University is knowledgeable about and in compliance with U.S. and tribal government policies and protocols. From 2017-2019 she was the acting NAGPRA officer for the Department of Anthropology and the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at UIUC, and she has served as the co/chair of the campus NAGPRA Advisory Committee since its establishment in 2020. She has been an appointed member of the Commission for the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains (TCETHER) of the American Anthropological Association since 2023 (the final report can be found here).