Overview
I am a historical and environmental anthropologist studying how people politicize “impure” environments in the long afterlife of American industry. Much of my work is based in Baltimore, where I follow industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time. I am especially interested in what kinds of environmental futures take form amid these legacies.
In my first book, (University of Chicago Press, 2024), I explore the central role of speculation in American life, from the vantage point of late industrial South Baltimore. The book is based on over a decade of fieldwork among residents, activists, industrialists, and bureaucrats there, and archival study covering more than 200 years. It tells the story of a place forged to enable futures elsewhere: from its early life as a quarantine zone under precautionary public-health regimes; through years spent provisioning the military for both real and speculative warfare; and culminating in plans to build the nation's largest trash incinerator there, billed as a “climate solution” and euphemistically called the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project. Early on, I show how efforts by city, state, nation, and corporation to master the future through ever more conjectural modes of governance have produced an ambiguously toxic atmosphere that has shaved years off locals’ lives. Later, I consider how people living with these burdens relate to the future from a present marked by doubt, after long-held expectations fall apart. Much of the ethnography tracks debates over the proposed incinerator, which were themselves debates about what residents could reasonably desire from within the haze kicked up by an aging industrial order. By following people’s efforts to plant their feet at the end of that world—so uncertain that conjecture has become a mode of life—the book seeks insights into the paths we might yet take, in the face of ecological apocalypse.
My newer research, on environmentally conscious separatist movements in the Pacific Northwest United States, moves to fresh terrain but stays with these core themes. Specifically, I train my eyes on efforts to repair body, soil, and soul from the degradations of the modern age by establishing a sovereign homeland in “Cascadia”—some liberatory, others decidedly less so, but all grappling with the legacies of the US settler project. Like Futures after Progress, this work combines ethnographic research with robust archival study, contributing to a research program that lies at the intersection of anthropology and US history.
My research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and several bodies at Cornell. I also serve on the editorial boards for Cultural Anthropology and Anthropological Quarterly. At Cornell, I teach courses on time, environment, and research design that draw together fiction, film, critical theory, and ethnographic texts, approaching anthropology as a capacious mode of inquiry.
Publications
Books
. 2024. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- An open-access copy of the book is available to read and download .
- 2025 Gregory Bateson Award, Honorable Mention
- 2024 Julian Steward Award, Honorable Mention
Edited Collections
2025. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 43(6): 921–90. (Co-edited with Zeynep Oguz.)
2023. American Anthropologist 125(3): 623–72. (Co-edited with Ali Feser, Alix Johnson, Erin McFee, and Amy Leia McLachlan.)
2022. Anthropological Quarterly 95(2): 241–474.
2020. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6: 416–590. (Co-edited with Alison Kenner.)
Peer-Reviewed Articles
American Anthropologist 128(1): 224–36. (Co-authored with Mona Bhan, Alexandra Coțofană, Radhika Govindrajan, Julia Leser, Zeynep Oguz, Yuka Suzuki, and Noah Theriault.)
2025. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 43(6): 921–28. (Co-authored with Zeynep Oguz.)
2025. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 43(6): 954–61. (Co-authored with Devin Proctor.)
2025. Public Culture 37(1): 15–37. (Co-authored with Devin Proctor.)
2023. Part of a peer-reviewed collection called “Hundreds for Katie.” Eduardo Hazera, ed. Anthropology and Humanism 48(2): 401.
2023. American Anthropologist 125(3): 623–8. (Co-authored with Ali Feser, Alix Johnson, Erin McFee, and Amy Leia McLachlan.)
2023. American Anthropologist 125(3): 633–7.
2023. Cultural Anthropology 38(3): 303–33.
2022. Anthropological Quarterly 95(2): 241–76.
2022. Anthropological Quarterly 95(2): 277–310.
2022. Part of a peer-reviewed forum called “The Vertiginous: Temporalities and Affects of Living in Vertigo.” Daniel M. Knight, Fran Markowitz, and Martin Demant Frederiksen, eds. Anthropological Theory Commons, June 3.
2020. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6: 462–85.
2020. Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6: 416–38. (Co-authored with Alison Kenner.)
2020. Part of a peer-reviewed forum called "Futile Political Gestures." Galina Stjepanovic, ed. Anthropological Theory Commons, October 16.
2019. American Ethnologist 46(3): 328–42.
- Winner of the Anthropology and Environment Society's , 2019
- Selected by American Ethnologist for open-access reprint in , 2021
- Selected by Wylie for curated collection on “,” 2022
2018. Cultural Anthropology 33(1): 142–71.
2017. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 48(1): 77–97.
2016. Text & Talk 36(2): 111–31.
2015. Education Policy Analysis Archives 23(45): 1–27.
Book Reviews
2021. Political and Legal Anthropology Review 44(2): 106–8.
2013. Anthropological Quarterly 86(3): 927–33.
Essays, Podcasts, Interviews, and Public Scholarship
Author of Forthcoming in Current Anthropology.
Author of 2025. History and Anthropology 36(5): 946–53.
Co-editor (with David Boarder Giles) and contributor of several essays (one with David Boarder Giles, Banafsheh Hussain, and Lia Ponciano-Diaz; one with David Boarder Giles; and one with Banafsheh Hussain and Finn West) for 2025. Educational ‘zine. Distributed in late November at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, and then on college campuses spread across three continents.
- Please print and distribute as you like, using the link above!
Interviewed (by Liliana Gil) for 2025. New Books Network, April 30.
Interviewed (by Olivia Hall) for 2025. Cornell Chronicle, March 19.
Interviewed (by Drake Facchinello) for 2025. The Daily Illini, March 10.
Interviewed (by Greg Feldman, with Devin Proctor) for 2025. Today's Totalitarianism, February 21.
Interviewed (by Marshal Zeringue) for 2024. The Page 99 Test, July 14.
Author (with Anand Pandian) of Op-ed for the Baltimore Beat, June 26, 2024.
Interviewed (by Adam Willis, Daniel Zawodny, and Ramsey Archibald) for Baltimore Banner, June 6, 2024.
Interviewed (by JC Whittington) for POLITICO, May 16, 2024.
Interviewed (by James Dean) for Cornell Chronicle, May 9, 2024.
Author of SAPIENS, April 23, 2024.
Interviewed (by Hannah Northey) for POLITICO, April 11, 2024.
Interviewed (by Matthew Zeitlin) for Heatmap, April 1, 2024.
Interviewed (by Jeff Tyson) for “Why Bridge Collapse Recovery is ‘Time to Listen’ to Baltimore Residents Impacted by Coal Shipping.” Cornell Chronicle, March 28, 2024.
Author of Op-ed for the Baltimore Sun, February 18, 2024.
Interviewed (by Fern Shen) for Baltimore Brew, December 5, 2023.
Author of public and written (Beginning at 00:56:30.) Baltimore City Council Investigatory Hearing, June 15, 2022.
Guest (with Rasheeda Green) on Episode of Crossroads podcast, May 19, 2021.
Interviewed (by Kate Blackwood) for Cornell Chronicle, November 30, 2020.
Work featured on Episode of Crossroads podcast, June 16, 2020.
Author of Somatosphere, January 20, 2020.
Interviewed (by Alize Arıcan) for American Ethnologist, September 20, 2019.
Author of Photo essay for Sapiens. November 28, 2018.
Interviewed (by Alexandra Vieux Frankel) for Dialogues, Cultural Anthropology, June 19, 2018.
Guest (with David Giles and Elana Resnick) on Conversations in Anthropology podcast, February 11, 2018.
Author (with Vincent Ialenti) of Op-ed for Sapiens. April 25, 2017.
Author of Part of a series called “Sensory Engagements with a Toxic World.” Chisato Fukuda, ed. Second Spear, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, March 29, 2017.
Author of Part of a series called “Ethnographer as Advocate.” Haley Bryant and Emily Cain, eds. Anthropology News. February 17, 2017.
Interviewed (by Diane Stopyra) for Salon, January 2, 2017.
Author of Part of a series called “Crisis of Liberalism.” Dominic Boyer, ed. Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology. November 30, 2016.
Recent recorded talks
Cornell University, “Chat in the Stacks” series, October 30, 2024.
Johns Hopkins University, Department of Anthropology, December 6, 2022.
University of Delaware, Department of Anthropology, October 27, 2022.
Cornell University, Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, May 9, 2022.
