I am an Anthropology PhD student at Princeton University. Prior to my doctoral studies, I was a freelance journalist reporting on environmental histories of displacement in Malaysia and interned at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. At the University of California-Davis, I earned a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Anthropology. My journalistic bylines have appeared on Blue Planet Society, China Dialogue, Deutsche Welle, Internews, Sentient Media, Southeast Asia Globe, The Ecologist, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. I’m also currently an editorial intern at the American Ethnological Society. Follow me on Twitter.

In my ethnographic work, I examine a wide range of human-nonhuman primate interfaces in contemporary Malaysia. I’m interested in how scientific paradigms such as ecology and its behavioral research methodologies mediate social relations between her human interlocutors and the free-ranging monkeys they interact with. Acknowledging local variations in environmental stressors and the ongoing power dynamics of capitalism and colonialism, I analyze how particular anthropocentric constructs of the environment are being imposed. In turn, these constructs influence how human communities culturally perceive the anthropogenic drivers of human-nonhuman animal conflict in Malaysia. By approaching environmental justice as navigating coalitional affinities, I collaborate with involved parties such as conservationists, orchard farmers, food vendors, forest rangers, ecotourism workers, priests, plantation owners, and urban residents. My work has been funded by Internews Malaysia/European Union, Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), Council on Science and Technology (CST), Princeton IHUM Reading Groups, and the Anthropology Department.

At Princeton, I am a teaching assistant for ANT214 (Anthropology and Environment) & ANT201 (Introduction to Anthropology), a social impact fellow at XPRIZE, and co-organizer for the IHUM Reading Group entitled Relationality, Animals, and the Environment.