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

I am interested in the politics of medicine; in particular, in how disabled and chronically ill people contend with debility when hegemonic forms of explanation and treatment fail. I examine this in the context of the United States, where biomedicine plays a particularly central role in adjudicating what kinds of lives people can lead.

My first book manuscript (under review) is Clinical Proximities: ME/CFS and Viral Uncertainty, an archival and ethnographic examination of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Read more about it here.

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

My second project is preliminarily titled Healing Touch: The Politics of Alternative Medicine in the US. It is a genealogy of “alternative medicine” as a concept and practice. I examine the multiplicity of its meanings—and polyvalent political motivations and material effects—in a highly stratified, privatized healthcare system. Right now, I’m looking at the role of alternative treatment in ACT UP.

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