Howdy! I am a sociocultural and environmental anthropologist who studies the politics of land, health, and resource extraction. I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at DePauw University.
My first book project, The Second Growth: Indigenous Resurgence, Settler Adaptation, and the Possibility of Repair in the Log Lands of the Canadian North, emerges from sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with logging companies, Dakelh First Nations hunters, elders, and forestry officials, complemented by archival, oral-historical, and GIS analyses. It traces how forestry transformed Dakelh forests into “log lands” and how Nak’azdli Whut’en and Binche Whut’en leaders negotiate “reconciled logging practices” to reclaim authority over their territories. My paper Reconciliation Capitalism recently won Harold K. Schneider Student Paper Prize in Economic Anthropology. Working in partnership with these communities, I co-designed the research questions, established oversight committees, and continue to return annually to maintain accountability and reciprocity; since 2023 I have also helped with the Binche Dakelh science summer camp.
I am currently in the early stages of developing my second book project, tentatively entitled The Ecology of Toxicity: An Ethnography of Uncertainty, and Harm in New Brunswick in New Brunswick, Canada which examines the emergence and response to the New Brunswick neurological syndrome of unknown cause in Eastern Canada.
My broader scholarly interests span environmental anthropology, Indigenous studies, political economy, and medical history. I have written on Indigenous sovereignty, colonial law, and “reconciliation capitalism” as well as the history of public health, race, and eugenics. I completed my PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University under the supervision of Angela Garcia. Prior to my doctoral work, I completed an MPhil. in Health, Medicine and Society, publishing on colonial public health, eugenics and forced sterilization (receiving the History of Psychology Association’s Paper of the Year award), and methods in medical anthropology. Earlier I trained as a biomedical researcher, studying immunology and cancer.