I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Bowdoin College. This site highlights my collaborative film and podcast productions, as well as my research projects, publications, and public scholarship.
My dissertation, Palya Futures: The Social Life of Kimberley Aboriginal Media, is based on 28 months of ethnographic research in the Kimberley region of Northwestern Australia since 2006. I follow the social lifecycles of dozens of film projects through daily collaboration within production teams, in order to understand the stakes of Aboriginal self-representation embedded within the process of filmmaking itself. My research analyzes the paradoxical relationship between the production of films that vividly imagine hopeful and diverse Indigenous futures, and the current widespread defunding of Aboriginal communities and organizations.
My research has been supported by grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright IIE US Scholar Program, the Lois Roth Endowment, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.