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.

My first book manuscript is Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and the Making of ME/CFS (in contract with Duke University Press). It looks at a disease defined by exhaustion after any form of exertion: myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a debilitating but neglected condition that surfaced as a diagnostic category in the 1980s. Recontextualizing the emergence of ME/CFS, I argue that living in an ill body is laborious. Work, the state, and the family structure not only the experience of illness, but who can be recognized as ill in the first place. Sick work is an uphill battle in the American context, a for-profit system of provisioning healthcare that relies on work, the family, or meager and stigmatized avenues of state support.

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. Unyoking alternative medicine from 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.