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 medical knowledge; in particular, in how disabled and chronically ill people contend with impairment when 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 is Contingent Care: Debility and Knowledge Politics in the Making of ME/CFS (in contract with Duke University Press). It is an archival and ethnographic examination of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a disabling but little-understood disease. It argues that work, the family, and the state compound and sustain the effects of biomedical uncertainty—making care contingent on laboring bodies and diagnostic categories. In the meantime, people with ME/CFS live life in chronic contingency, inhabiting both scientific and bodily unknowns, in ways that both animate and constrain their advocacy.

My new work is on HIV/AIDS, looking at the role of alternative treatment in ACT UP, and the political relationships between AIDS and other chronic illnesses in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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.