I am an anthropologist of law, history, and culture working with critical and visual methods.

I am a legal and political anthropologist studying how law structures power in society. I have conducted research in East and Southeast Asia since 2010, mostly in China and Burma (Myanmar). I use ethnographic, historical, and legal research methods to interrogate the relationship between law and identity in Southeast Asia and the United States. I earned my Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2023.

I conducted research for my doctoral dissertation in Burma from 2017-2020 and in London in 2022. I am additionally developing new research through projects in the United States and in the Thai-Burma border. You can learn more about all of my projects below.

You can view my latest academic article, Courting Colonialism: Considering Litigation as an Act of Citizenship in Colonial Burma, here.

Racial Categories, Religious Exclusions.

My dissertation studies the colonial jurisprudence of litigation involving mixed Chinese-Burmese Buddhist families in colonial Burma. I argue that the heterodox religious practices of mixed-race subjects effectively dispossessed Asian subjects who cross the color line, creating new socio-political tensions around the subject of interracial partnerships. I illustrate the material impacts this colonial legal work had in particular on mixed-race women who sought to claim civil rights through the courts.

Countermapping Burmese Borderlands

This ongoing project works with Burmese displaced by the 2021 military coup. We use photography and narrative storytelling to chart the paths that brought these young exiles to the places they are now, and tell the world about the futures’ they are working to create.

To Kill a Mountain Lion

This new project investigates the discursive and material worlds of hunters organizing to protect the right to hunt mountain lions in the United States. This project aims to understand how a niche group of hunters creates coalitions with both other hunters and non-hunting groups, and communicate the personal, ecological, and cultural significance of their lifestyle to a wary public.