I am a PhD Candidate at the UCSF-UC Berkeley Joint PhD Program in Medical Anthropology, and a student affiliate with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Institute for Study of Societal Issues at UC Berkeley. I have served as a student member of the REPAIR Project at UCSF. Currently, I hold the UCSF UC Dissertation-Year Fellowship for 2025-2026. I am a medical and environmental anthropologist who investigates the multi-species impacts of the afterlives of slavery in the Caribbean.

Outside of academia, I am a 200-hour certified yoga teacher at Corepower Yoga. I formerly served as a volunteer community organizer for Students Unite Now at Yale College, and New Haven Rising in New Haven, Connecticut.

Special Interests

Anthropology of Science; more-than-human entanglements; multi-species ethnography; Critical Race Theory; Queer Crip Theory; environmental racism; supernaturecultures; Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), Caribbean studies; invasive animals; post-colonial theory; STS; consent; uncanny; haunting

Dissertation Research 

What does it mean for people and animals to be labelled as problems? As human-animal encounters become increasingly contentious and environmental tensions escalate worldwide, my research on the issue of invasive green monkeys (Chlorocebus sabaeus) on St. Kitts, a primarily Black Caribbean island, reveals how the designation of people and animals as problems is used to justify the reproduction of plantation logics, which are predicated on non-consent and violence. My dissertation, “Primates and Plantation Futures: Unsettling Science, Race, and Consent on St. Kitts,” contends that only by critically attending to the non-consents experienced by both people and animals, in the past and present, can we turn away from violent investments in the reproduction of plantation logics and embrace a queer feminist sense of futurity.

Green monkeys were introduced to St. Kitts by trans-Atlantic slave traders over 350 years ago. Green monkeys are categorized as an invasive species because they disrupt subsistence farming projects, and both Kittitian people and green monkeys today suffer from food insecurity. Scientists, veterinarians, policymakers, and primatologists have sought to solve this so-called “monkey problem,” which has been escalating since the abolition of sugar plantations on St. Kitts in 2004, but they remain unsuccessful. Funded by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant and multiple scholarships, I conducted 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and archival inquiry on St. Kitts at farms, laboratories, local archives, and eco-tourist destinations. I posit that the monkey problem presents as a site of uncanny relations, wherein both Kittitian people and monkeys are haunted by the afterlives of slavery, fantasies of scientific objectivity, and the legacies of plantation logics.