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 the United States—in particular, in what everyday people have to do when medical, state, and bureaucratic systems fail them.

My first book is Sick Work: Exhaustion, Labor, and Invisible Illness (Duke University Press, September 2026). It looks at myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS—a disease defined by disproportionate exhaustion after any form of exertion, which has no cure or treatment—in the US. I argue that living in a chronically ill, disabled body is labor. With constrained options for medical care and facing stigma and disbelief, people with ME/CFS must advocate for the reality of their debility through navigating exhausting bureaucracies and doing the everyday work of disease advocacy. Changing formations of labor, moreover, determine what counts as disability and what does not, especially under the shadow of “malingering” so prominent in US culture.

My research work is on the multiple, fraught, and contradictory politics of “alternative medicine” in the United States. Currently, I am looking 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. I am also interested in the historical, racial, and regulatory factors that uphold “alternative medicine” as a coherent and legible category—or not.

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.