I am a cultural and economic anthropologist, currently teaching in the Department of Anthropology at SMU. My research and teaching interests include capitalism, the state, cash transfers, work, value, morality, ethnography, and contemporary Europe (particularly the Nordic countries). My first book project, based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oslo, Norway, examines the everyday lives of the unemployed in order to rethink the Nordic welfare model as a system of sociocultural and moral incorporation.
My recent work includes an article on work and welfare in Economic Anthropology, an article on job-seeker courses and neoliberalism in the Anthropology of Work Review, and a chapter on the moral sustainability of the Nordic Model in Sustainable Modernity: The Nordic Model and Beyond (Routledge). In addition to revising my book manuscript, I am currently preparing a book chapter in Scandinavia in Transition (University of Wisconsin Press) and an edited volume, Digesting Difference: Migrant Incorporation and Mutual Belonging in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan).
My research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study, the Norwegian Centre for International Cooperation in Education, the Princeton Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. In 2018, I was awarded the Harold K. Schneider Student Prize in Economic Anthropology by the Society for Economic Anthropology.
Before coming to SMU, I received my PhD (2019) and MA (2014) in Anthropology from Princeton University. I also have an A.B. in Literary Arts and International Relations from Brown University, where I was awarded Honors in Creative Writing for writing, of all things, a novella.
