Religion, politics, and material life
Cambodian political economy, labor, land, memory, violence, critical theory, and the institutions through which collective worlds are made.
Scholarship
Religious life as a field of relationship, material practice, and imagination.
Research and teaching centered on Cambodian Buddhism, ritual, death, memory, political life, and the theory of religion.
Research areas
Rebirth, memory, and relationship
Past-life memory, karma, kinship, moral personhood, and the obligations through which lives become connected across time.
Buddhist boundaries and sovereignty
Sīmās, territorial imagination, religious institutions, kingship, political authority, and the making of Buddhist communities.
Death, funerals, and ritual power
The ritual care of the dead, relations with spirits, material practices, agriculture, gifts, and the moral authority of Buddhist monks.
Current projects
Nuon Chea’s New Buddhism
A book-length study, based in part on a 2005 interview that Davis and Sor Sokny conducted with Nuon Chea, of how he retrospectively recast Buddhism in relation to moral responsibility, revolutionary politics, and violence. Under contract with Bridwell Press; anticipated publication in 2027.
Cambodia and hauntology
A developing research project bringing Cambodia into conversation with hauntology.
The Perfect Funeral of Norodom Sihanouk
An article drawing on Davis’s attendance at the 2013 royal funeral to examine how ritual performance and claims to legitimate mourning brought political succession, sovereignty, and public memory together.