Fellowship / Graduate Student Fellows

Lizzy Cooper Davis

  • 2016–2017
  • Radcliffe Institute Graduate Student Fellow
  • Harvard University
Headshot of Lizzy Cooper Davis
Photo by Tony Rinaldo

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Lizzy Cooper Davis is a doctoral candidate in Harvard University’s Department of African and African American Studies. Her interests include the anthropology of race, black Atlantic performance and spiritual traditions, critical race theory, and the role of the arts in social movements. 

Davis is completing her dissertation on the freedom songs of the civil rights movement. This project offers an interdisciplinary social history of the making and memorializing of the movement’s musical repertoire and focuses on cross-racial dialogues and disputes about the uses of black culture and the politics of black sound.

Along with her scholarly work, Davis facilitates equity and inclusion workshops at Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, runs retreats on social issues at the Posse Foundation, and works as a consultant on cultural history and organizing with Urban Bush Women. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MA from New York University, and an AM from Harvard and coedited Enacting Pleasure: Artists and Scholars Respond to Carol Gilligan’s New Map of Love (Seagull Books, 2011).

Our 2023–2024 Fellows

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