Douglas J. Davies is an anthropologist and theologian specialising in the history, theology, and social-scientific study of death.
Davies’s research interests embrace the anthropology, sociology, and phenomenology of religion, Mormonism, Sikhism, Anglicanism, and the ongoing interface between Anthropology and Theology (2002). His noteworthy titles Meaning and Salvation in Religious Studies (1984); The Encyclopedia of Cremation (2005); The Theology of Death (2008); Emotion, Identity, and Religion (2011); and Mors Britannica: Lifestyle and Death-Style in Britain Today (2015).
Death, Ritual, and Belief: The Rhetoric of Funerary Rites, now in its third edition, has been translated into five languages. In 2024, Davies published a major six-volume work on The Cultural History of Death spanning 2,500 years from Classical Antiquity to the Modern Age.
Davies was elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2009, the Learned Society of Wales in 2012, and the British Academy in 2017.He is the director of the Centre for Death and Life Studies at Durham University.
