Coralynn Davis

Educational Background

• B.A., Wesleyan
• M.A. and a Ph.D., Michigan University at Ann Arbor

Research Interests

• Women's and Gender Studies
• Anthropology
• Feminist Theory/Method
• Folklore Studies
• Transnational Studies
• Critical Development
• Expressive Practices (folklore)
• South Asia
• Nepal

Courses

• FOUN 098.40 Beyond Culture Shock
• WMST 150 (Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies)
• WMST 220 (Feminist Thought and Action)
• WMST/ANTH 251 (Gender, Power, and Global Development)
• WMST/SOCI 332 (Women and the Penal System)
• WMST 400 (Advanced Seminar in Women's and Gender Studies)

Selected Publications

2026 “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Defining and Contextualizing Mithila Studies,” co-authored with special issue co-editors Pranav Prakash and Chris Diamond, Asian Ethnology 85:1.

2026 “Collaborative Scholarship and the Politics of Participation: Linking Expressive Arts and Social Change in Mithila,” Asian Ethnology 85:1.

2025 “Painting Stories and Filming Change in Contemporary Mithila,” in The Work of Art: India’s Mithila Painting, University of Washington Press, Global South Asia Series.

2023 Sama in the Forest, documentary film based on my research. Producer. (Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources.)

2018 “When Heterosexual Identity is Questioned: Stifling Suspicion Through Public Displays of Heterosexual Identity.” Laurel R. Davis-Delano, Elizabeth M. Morgan, Ann Gillard, and Coralynn V. Davis. Journal of Homosexuality 65(13): 1683-1708. (Published online, October 2017.)

2014 “Transnational Marriage: Modern Imaginings, Relational Realignments, and Persistent Inequalities.” Ethnos Journal of Anthropology, special guest-edited issue on Intimacies and Sexualities in Out-of-the-Way Places 79(5):585-609.

2014 “Strategic Deployments of ‘Sisterhood’ and Questions of Solidarity at a Women’s Development Project in Janakpur, Nepal.” Himalaya: The Journal for the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies, special issue on “Gender in the Himalaya” 34(1):56-67.

Maithil Women’s Tales: Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border  University of Illinois Press, 2014.

“How Porous are the Walls that Separate Us? Feminist Pedagogy, Incarceration, and Disseminating Knowledge.” Co-author, Carol Wayne White. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations(special issue on Social Justice Action, Teaching and Research) (2012), vol 34:85-104.

"Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, and Defecating Men: The Power of Storytelling in Maithil Women's Tales." Journal of American Folklore (2009) vol. 122 (485): 267-296.

"Im/possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, and Affinal Solidarity in Modern South Asia." Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (2009) vol. 15 (2): 243-272.

"Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers in Maithil Women's Expressive Forms." Journal of American Folklore (2008) vol. 121 (481):286-318.

"Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? and Other Questions of  Value, Meaning and Identity in the Circulation of Janakpur Art." Tourist Studies (2007) vol. 7 (2): 193-223.

"'Listen, Rama's Wife!': Maithil Women's Perspectives and Practices in the Festival of Sāmā Cakevā." Asian Folklore Studies (2005) vol. 64 (1): 1-38.

"Feminist Tigers and Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies and Instrument Effects in the Struggle for Definition and Control over Development in Nepal." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2003) vol. 3 (2): 204-249.