A cultural and linguistic anthropologist, my research is broadly concerned with the ethical contestations emergent in new language, media, and legal formations in the Philippines, as well as in the United States. I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Before coming to Johns Hopkins University, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

I am particularly interested in spaces of technological formation in language and how the interiorities of speaking and non-speaking subjects are thought to be made legible. I am currently conducting research on generative AI and the mapping of sentiment and feeling onto language, as well as the increasing role of assistive technologies in navigating speech disabilities. This research is situated in Ireland as well as the United States

I am also currently conducting research on an ethnographic project examining the ethics and practices of abstraction around different types of death in the Philippines. Among other spaces, this project explores the collection of evidence in extrajudicial killings in Manila, the measuring of the dying of biodiversity, bureaucracies of indigenous deaths in Mindoro, and the data production around natural disasters.

My first book, The Copy Generic: How the Non-Specific Makes our Social Worlds (University of Chicago Press, 2022), seeks to rethink the role of “generic” social forms. While we are seemingly surrounded by the culturally worn-out, discarded, and over-produced, this book describes how such spaces of overload and repetition have emerged as important templates and semiotic short-hands across cultural lines, forcing us to rethink the very nature of newness, replication, and of non-specificity. The Copy Generic moves among the ethnographic and historical spaces of Bible translation and Sign language, legal discourses on indigeneity, media and branding in Southeast Asia, Christian missionaries, as well as the postcolonial inheritances of American infrastructural design in Manila. It was a winner of the 2023 Society for Linguistic Anthropology New Voices Book Prize.

I am the founder and co-director of the Language, Media, and AI Lab (LAMA Lab) at Johns Hopkins University.

• Spring 2026 AI: Utopias, Dystopias, and Everything in Between (Undergraduate)
• Fall 2025 Invitation to Anthropology (Undergraduate)
• Fall 2025, 2023 Proposal Writing (Graduate)
• Spring 2025 Methods in Anthropology (Undergraduate)
• Spring 2025 Naming and Namelessness (Graduate)
• Fall 2023 Politics of Language (Undergraduate/Graduate)
• Spring 2023 Proseminar: Circulations (Graduate)
• Fall 2022 Ethnographies (Undergraduate)

Books

• 2022 The Copy Generic: How the Nonspecific Makes Our Social Worlds. University of Chicago Press.

Journal Articles

• 2025, “Naming and Namelessness,” Annual Review of Anthropology Vol. 54: 327-342
• 2019 “Brand Displaced: Trademarking, Unmarking and Making the Generic,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Vol. 9, No. 3: 498-513.
• 2019 “Of Congregations and Corporations: Schism, Transcendence, and the Religious Incorporate in the Philippines,” Anthropological Quarterly Vol. 92, No. 4: 1039-1068.
• 2015 “Divinely Generic: Bible Translation and the Semiotics of Circulation,” Signs and Society Vol 3, No. 2: 234-260.

Other Publications

• 2020 “For God and State: Collaboration and Complicity, and the Work of ‘Intention’ in Duterte’s Philippines” in Collaboration in the Neoliberal Age, edited by Fiona Murphy and Emma Heffernan. Routledge Press, 251-264.
• 2020 “Money, Materiality, and Fungible Selves,” Review Forum, New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity: 8-13.
• 2019 Invited commentary on “Are They Serious? The Discourses of Family Planning, Bio-Citizenship and Nationalism in the Philippines” by Paul Matthews, Sabangan, Vol 5: 112-118.
• 2018 “Learning the Code of Plural,” Journal of World Christianity Vol. 8, No. 2: 176-182.