I am a cultural anthropologist and queer theorist concerned with viruses, security, queer youth, and media. I am an assistant professor of anthropology at Wake Forest University and visiting researcher in the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes at the University of Helsinki. Two common through lines that connect my research together are my feminist and queer commitments to a politics of difference that saturates any sociocultural research field, and generative interpretations of temporality that link pasts, presents, and futures together in novel configurations. I see security weave through the majority of my work, from the treatment of queer bodies and interpretation of sex panics to the representation and management of microbes in the arctic. My work spans different foci in the hopes of making connections across disciplines, fields, sites, methods, theories, and investments.
My current work moves in two directions. The first concerns the social life of viruses, a project that queries the ways viruses are understood, represented, and interpreted from different perspectives, including scientists and bioartists. I am especially concerned with how viruses instantiate sociality and relationality between humans and between humans and nonhumans, but also how these socialities challenge pandemic-laden assumptions of viruses and microbes more broadly. The second project focuses on queer theory at the end of the world, a cultural and theoretical endeavor that seeks to generate various forms of queer theory in the crucible of destruction and amidst the rubble of the apocalypse. By interrogating cultural and media texts, this project moves through various touchstones in science and technology studies that bring destruction and creation together in novel ways.