Cultural Anthropologist // Researcher
I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University, where I specialize in death and dying, queer theory, science and technology studies, and medical anthropology. My dissertation project, “A Life Cut Short: American Deathcare, Life Expectancy, and the Quantification of Progress” ethnographically focuses on death doulas and how they conceptualize the life course in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With generous support from the National Science Foundation, my research examines emergent deathcare practices that resist biomedical understandings of death and the breathless futurology of life extension technologies. Ultimately, I am interested in tracing reorientations towards mortality in a cultural context that has largely been adverse to death and the vulnerability it entails. This work is largely based in Seattle, but is also heavily informed by fieldwork I have conducted in Los Angeles and Boston over the past three years.
At Rice, I am a Media Specialist for the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and a former coordinator of The Ethnography Studio. I also serve as the Chief Contributing Editor for the Society for Cultural Anthropology and am the graduate representative for the Association for Queer Anthropology. Outside of academia, I have written articles and served as a social media manager for the educational website Talk Death. 🖤💀