About

I currently serve as the associate director of national development for Braven, a national nonprofit closing the college-to-career gap for thousands of low-income and first generation students. I formerly taught Anthropology and Core Curriculum at Carthage College and Columbia University. As an Applied Anthropologist, my research focused on the reinvention and revitalization of place through art and performance. Both in my teaching and research I aim to ask different kinds of questions and find new avenues of inquiry into spaces that we think we know. At the core of all my scholarly activity is the question, “How do people imagine their future?” Whether focusing on the reinvention of place, or young people’s first steps on a college campus, I am centrally concerned with how people deal with uncertainty and attempt to exert agency on their changing social worlds.

In my work as a development officer, I continue to employ my anthropology training by identifying the unspoken alignments between what nonprofits need and the impact donors want to have in the world. I excel at translating what nonprofits do into the language of

This website is an exploration of the various angles of approach that I take to answer that question, from my ethnographic research in Northern Ireland, to the Core Curricula I teach, and the alternative assessment methodologies in which I attempt to capture the intangible outcomes of a liberal arts education. In my blog, The Left Hand of the Humanities, I discuss these experiences and reflect, with an ethnographer's inquiring eye, on my work at the crossroads of the humanities.