Washington University in St. Louis

Faculty Member, Anthropology

Associate Professor

About

I am a medical and psychological anthropologist as well as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with an active psychotherapy practice.

My work sits at the intersection of anthropology, psychiatry, religion, and gender studies.  I am interested in how individuals experience existential distress, and how this distress manifests as psychiatric symptoms, religious angst, somatic pain, and other culturally informed bodily conditions.  Specifically, I consider how bodily practices deemed “deviant,” “extreme,” or “pathological”—and local responses to such practices—make visible competing cultural logics of acceptable moral personhood.  I have been most intrigued by the ways in which subjective experiences of suffering are systematically targeted for change through the cultivation of different forms of body discipline (e.g., in a convent or an eating disorders treatment center) and how institutions shape, but do not entirely dictate, these processes.  Through the ethnographic study of extreme bodily experiences and their institutional “scaffolding” I aim to understand cultural processes of meaning making as collaborative, agentic, and morally imbued, and how such meaning assumes motivational force for individuals; that is, how people use their bodies to navigate competing cultural and moral frames in order to make sense of the world and their place in it.