anthropologist of the body, medicine, science & technology
I am a medical anthropologist whose research examines the everyday, lived nature of highly experimental frontier science, paying deep attention to the body and home as key, although often underlooked, sites of science-making.
I’m fascinated by the messiness, approximations, and improvisations that go along with humans and machines living with/toward/against one another in everyday life.
My work integrates medical anthropology, feminist studies of science and technology, neuroscience, sensory studies, critical disability studies and crip technoscience, embodiment, critical data studies, and experimentality.
I am passionate about ethnographic writing and hybrid narrative nonfiction, along with the teaching and practice of narrative medicine.
I am an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the Centre for Medical Science & Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen. I hold a PhD in anthropology from Princeton University and a BA from Duke University in anthropology with a minor in neuroscience.
I was recently awarded the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship, which I will begin in 2024, jointly hosted at the University of Copenhagen and Yale University.
My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the European Research Council, and I am honoured to have been awarded the Porter O. Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton’s highest graduate student honor.
I am currently writing my first book, THE CONNECTOR (under contract with Duke University Press), an ethnography that follows the first people to live with intimately integrated neuromusculoskeletal prosthetic limbs.
My next project explores the cultural politics of the uterus, (m)otherhood, and reproduction in the US and Sweden, through the lens of frontier clinical trials in uterus transplantation.
publications & projects:
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reverse-engineering touch (body & society)
An article on the making of neuroprosthetic touch and sensory feedback, which I interpret as a reverse-engineering: in which efforts to engineer sensory feedback recursively inform basic scientific understanding about touch itself
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Oikography
A seminar at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) and forthcoming anthology on the anthropology of homes / housing in ethnography and critical theory, chaired by João Biehl and Federico Neiburg
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The Connector: An Anthropology of Experimental Neuroprosthetic Science and its Bodies and Homes
PhD Dissertation, Princeton 2021 (currently under embargo as I prepare book manuscript for publication with an academic press)
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The Datafication of pain (biosocieties)
An article on the ways in which phantom limb pain is measured and turned into data in clinical trials — and all that escapes this measurement.
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living with a neuromusculoskeletal prosthesis (frontiers in neurorobotics)
An interview-based article on the experiences of the first people to live with neuromusculoskeletal prosthetic limbs…
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Health in data space (big data & society)
A co-written article on the formative and experiential dimensions of cross-border health data sharing in the EU
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the social life of medicine in northern togo (book chapter, duke press)
A book chapter about the social work of an indigenous medical system of a village in Northern Togo, West Africa
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out of the clinic, into the home (journal of pain research)
An article about the in-home use of a therapeutic technology to treat phantom limb pain
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storying otherwise (society of cultural anthropology)
A review of the documentary ‘Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival’
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field sketching (society for cultural anthropology)
An article about anthropologists using sketching as a tool in fieldwork
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beyond the fieldwork imaginary (American anthropologist)
An article on undergraduate publishing in anthropology
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reterritorialization of the body (anthropological quarterly)
A review essay on ethnographies of emergent biotechnologies
media & interviews:
Article on neuromusculoskeletal prostheses in Göteborgs-Posten