About

I am a political anthropologist who specializes in Central America and writes on revolution and its afterlives, populist politics, authoritarianism, affect and aesthetics. I am currently preparing a book manuscript titled Afterlives of Revolution: authoritarian populism and political passions in post-revolutionary Nicaragua which examines populist governance and affective attachments to the Sandinista political project after the return of Daniel Ortega to power in 2007. My larger conceptual interests are in political theology, debt, inheritance and generational difference, political violence, and feminist and queer imaginaries of the future. I received my PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2020 and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Associate for the “Neoliberalism at the Neopopulist Crossroads” Sawyer Seminar at the University of Arizona for the 2020-2021 academic year. Starting in the Fall of 2021, I will be serving as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. My articles have been published in the Cahiers des Ameriques Latines, and and the Hotspots section of Cultural Anthropology. My ethnographic work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the De Karman Foundation.

In the past, I have used participatory filmmaking as an ethnographic method as well as a mode of intervening in debates about the politics of memory in Nicaragua. I was awarded a Davis Projects for Peace Grant to develop a summer-long experimental documentary filmmaking workshop with Nicaraguan youth and produce four short films that engage with Nicaragua’s recent past, exploring the local and intimate histories of the revolution and the civil war based on the experiences of participant’s families. As part of my B.A Degree in Anthropology and Visual Arts from Princeton University, I also produced, edited and directed a documentary film on the memories of displacement of Nicaraguans from San Juan del Norte, a town that was hard-hit by the Contra War, and how these memories re-membered frame the the politics of the town today.