I am a LSA Collegiate Fellow at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. In 2024, I received my PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley.

I am a political and historical sociologist researching the intersection of land, the formation of the modern state, and what we have come to call the economy. My award-winning research examines the role of large scale infrastructure projects such as the Erie Canal and first transcontinental railroad in American political and economic development. In doing so, I reveal the  way in which dispossessed Indigenous lands were woven into American public finance as the “public lands,” and the centrality of territory management concerns–such as infrastructure promotion–in American state formation.

In other work, with the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP), I analyze the San Francisco Bay Area’s transformation as a knowledge economy hub and the new geographies of opportunity and precarity that resulted. As a collective of scholars, artists, and activists, AEMP privileges the perspectives of those most directly affected by displacement to build knowledge of the housing crisis from the ground up that can act as counter-narratives to dominant policy discourses. This work has resulted in, among other publications and projects, a collaboratively published book, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2021).

My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the San Francisco Arts Commission, the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, and the Tobin Project, among others. My research and writing have been published in ACME: An International Journal of Critical Geographies, Environment & Planning D: Society and Space, the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, and Contemporary Sociology, and has won awards from the American Sociological Association section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology, and Honorable Mentions from the Theory section and the Comparative-Historical Sociology sections. I have been an invited speaker at venues from the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, to Urban Planning at MIT, and the Museum of Capitalism. 

You can view my CV here.