Jenny L. Davis is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where she is the director of the Native American and Indigenous Languages (NAIL) Lab and an affiliate faculty of American Indian Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies. She is the 2019-2021 Chancellor's Fellow of Indigenous Research & Ethics, and serves as the UIUC campus NAGPRA officer.

She earned her PhD in Linguistics at University of Colorado, Boulder in 2013. She was the 2010-2011 Henry Roe Cloud Fellow in American Indian Studies at Yale University, and a 2013-2014 Lyman T. Johnson Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on contemporary Indigenous language(s) and identity, with dual focuses on Indigenous language revitalization and Indigenous gender and sexuality. 

Her 2018 book from the University of Arizona Press, Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance received the 2019 Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Monograph inAmerican Indian Studies. It and additional publications focus on Chickasaw language revitalization (Language and Communication, 2016 and The Changing World Religion Map, 2015). In addition,  she has published in a number of topics and fields, including gendered representations in Breton language revitalization media (Gender & Language, 2012); the discourses about language endangerment in media (Language Documentation & Description, 2017); and language, Indigeneity, and gender/sexuality in Two Spirit identity (Queer Excursions, 2014). Her 2014 co-edited volume from Oxford University Press, Queer Excursions: Retheorizing Binaries in Language, Gender, and Sexuality, was awarded the Ruth Benedict Book Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology and the American Anthropological Association.