I am a legal and historical anthropologist interested in the ways that law structures power in society. I use ethnographic, historical, and legal studies methods to investigate the legal construction of race and gender in Burma and the United States.
I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023. My dissertation, Racial Categories, Religious Distinctions: Mixed Buddhists and the Burma Laws Act, 1898-1947, theorizes how colonial law constructed intra-Asian distinction by reference to religious incompatibility. I argue that the heterodox religious practices of mixed-race subjects made them unrecognizable within British Burma’s imperial legal frameworks, dispossessing litigants who crossed the color line. I show how this had material impacts in particular for the ability of mixed-race women and women in mixed marriages to pursue rights claims, and how the identity constructions imagined in colonial jurisprudence remain relevant in Burma today.
You can view my latest article, Categorical Confusions: Gender and the Colonial Construction of the ‘Chinese Buddhist’ in Burma, here.