Kathy Davis is currently senior research fellow in the PARIS research program and the Department of Sociology at the VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Born in the US, she has taught psychology, sociology, and gender studies at universities in Europe and the Netherlands. Since 1990, she has worked as associate professor in women's studies and, later, as senior researcher at the Institute of History and Culture at Utrecht University. She has held visiting chairs and research fellowships in the United States at Wellesley College, Columbia University, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University as well as in Germany (Maria Jahoda Chair for International Women's Studies), Sweden, and Finland.

Kathy Davis has a long-standing interest in feminist scholarship on women's bodies and health. Her work is situated at the cutting edge between cultural studies, gender studies, and the sociology of the body. She has published extensively on contemporary feminist approaches to the body, interaction between physicians and women patients, cultural constructions of beauty and beauty practices, and the political and ethical dimensions of surgical technologies. Her research interests also include biography as methodology, reflexivity, intersectionality, feminism as travelling theory, and transnational biographies, social practices, and theory. She is currently working on a book about tango and passion in a transnational perspective.