My work as an anthropologist broadly concerns how newness enters the world, something commonly understood as creativity or imagination. I particularly interested in the contours of possibility for underrepresented or marginalized groups under conditions of apparent constraint or scarcity. I have used ethnographic and historical approaches to explore how building practices and cultural production shape political subjectivity in urban squatter settlements. My research in Brazil tracks how these environments become fields of skilled material practice, technocratic knowledge, and artistic expression. Before arriving at Hopkins, I received my Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Graduate Center at City University of New York (CUNY) and conducted postdoctoral research at the London School of Economics.

My first book project, titled Model Favela: Miniature Life in Rio de Janeiro, based on four years of ethnographic research, is about the social ordering of creativity. It analyzes an iconoclastic role-playing game in which a cohort of Afro-Brazilian working-class male youth represent a dynamic but uneven cityscape in a hand-built model of Rio, constructed with painted bricks and found scraps. I frame this idiosyncratic object at the heart of my study of the porous boundaries between the imaginary and the real, between contemporary experience and hidden histories of the city. The book suggests that the production of reality, in social life as in writing, is intrinsically bound up with power relations and the worldly structurings we inhabit, study, and build.

I welcome graduate students and undergraduate honors majors interested in urbanization in the global South, play and performance, capitalism as lived experience and its dissident imaginations, experimental ethnographic writing, and anthropological thought, especially minor histories at the discipline’s edges. For more on my role as advisor and instructor, as well as a list of courses I have taught with links to syllabi, see the teaching section on this page.

I am committed to mentoring graduate and undergraduate students in preparation for further work in and beyond academia. My approach to teaching is much like my engagement with ethnography. I have observed first-hand how doing becomes a method for knowing, so my teaching strategies aim to have students not only learn about anthropology but also practice it. I offer courses that reflect anthropology’s diverse voices, and I encourage students to recognize that mastery of a discipline must be accompanied by a healthy skepticism toward our own habits of thought.

Undergraduate

• Invitation to Anthropology
• Ethnographies
• Human Nature Under Capitalism
• The Anthropology of Play
• An Introduction to Reality
• Invisible Cities
• Latin America in a Fracturing World
• Ethnographic Perspectives on Brazil
• The Atlantic World
• Logic of Anthropological Inquiry

Graduate

• Proseminar
• Defining Region
• Reading Marx
• Play, Performance, and Personhood
• Latin America in a Globalizing World

Book manuscript

• Model Favela: Miniature Life in Rio de Janeiro. Accepted for book series “Atelier: Ethnographic Inquiry in the Twenty-First Century,” University of California Press. [Forthcoming]

Journal Articles 

• My Neighbor the Gringo: Commercialized Intimacies and Newcomer Hospitality in a Rio de Janeiro Favela.” Co-authored with Gareth A. Jones. Cultural Anthropology 40(4): 726–752. (2025) https://doi.org/10.14506/ca40.4.07
• “A Favela That Yields Fruit: Community-Based Tour Guides as Brokers in the Political Economy of Cultural Difference.” Space and Culture 23(1): 15-33. (2020) https://doi.org/10.1177/1206331219865694
• “What does poverty feel like? Urban inequality and the politics of sensation.” Co-authored with Rivke Jaffe, Eveline Dürr, Gareth A. Jones, Alana Osbourne, and Barbara Vodopivec. Urban Studies 57(5): 1015-1031. (2020) https://doi.org/10.1177/0042098018820177
• “Favela in Replica: Iterations and Itineraries of a Miniature City.” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 20(3): 39-60. (2016) https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12174
• “Ludic Maps and Capitalist Spectacle in Rio de Janeiro.” Geoforum Special Issue: Spectacle Cities, 65: 421-430. (2015) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.01.015 

Other Publications

• “Expansive Mood.” In “Flash Ethnography,” Carole McGranahan and Nomi Stone, editors, American Ethnologist website, October 26. (2020)
• “Monitored Confinement and Rule by Philanthropy in Rio de Janeiro and Baltimore.” In: “Speaking Justice to Power: Confinement, Cauterization, and Antipolitics in the Americas.” Eds. Curtis, Jennifer and Irwin, Randi. Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), 12 November. (2018)
• (Also published in: Authoritarianism and Confinement in the Americas. Eds. Curtis, Jennifer and Irwin, Randi. São Luís, Brazil: Editora UEMA, 2019, pp. 60-63.)
• “Overcharged: Notes on a Favela Fridge Swap.” In: "Our Lives with Electric Things." Cultural AnthropologyFieldsights. Theorizing the Contemporary series. (2017)
• “Art of the Conference Paper.” Inside Higher Ed. 3 November. (2010)
• “Urban Anthropology.” Encyclopedia of Urban Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. 840-844. (2010)