I am an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, with secondary appointments in Asian American and Diaspora Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies.

I am interested in the politics of medicine—in particular, how disabled and chronically ill people contend with the precarity of their bodies when biomedical treatments fail. The stakes are high in the United States, where for-profit insurance systems, meager avenues of state support, and the reliance on the family structure care.

My first book manuscript is The Work of Debility: Illness, Embodiment, and the Making of ME/CFS (in contract with Duke University Press). It examines how people with ME/CFS carve out meaningful lives in the face of uncertainty and impairment. It argues that debility is, and does, work: regimes of labor shape what counts as disability and what passes as “normal,” and in the meantime, chronically ill people are left to do the labor of advocating for themselves and one another. It ultimately asks: what forces dictate what kinds of lives disabled people can lead, and what makes a worthy life?

My new work is on HIV/AIDS. I look at AIDS activists’ relationships to alternative medicine in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when treatment options were profoundly constrained or non-existent. Rather than associate alternative medicine with denialism, I ask how activists made spiritual and political meaning around non-Western treatments when they sought to die on their own terms.

I am interdisciplinarily trained with degrees from Sarah Lawrence College (BA) and New York University (PhD, American Studies).

I live in Durham, NC and Brooklyn, NY with my Miniature Schnauzer, Frankie.