Trained in cultural anthropology and public health, I'm interested in the dynamic relations between medicine and everyday social and political life.
I studied biology and linguistics in college, dividing my thoughts between bench work in a lab and fieldwork on the politics of global HIV prevention and treatment discourse. During my first year of public health school, I found myself in a graduate seminar in medical anthropology and became captivated by ethnographic writing. I worked in reproductive health and HIV policy in both NGO and government settings in the years that followed. But it was ethnographic research that called to me: the narrative granularities of people’s lives that reveal how large-scale social transformations and inequalities play out on the ground.
My most recent book, Lifelines: The Traffic of Trauma, reflects on the enduring links between medicine and movement. It develops an in-depth account of India’s high rates of traffic accidents and traumatic injuries, told through the story of one of Mumbai’s busiest public hospital emergency wards.
My previous book, Metabolic Living, documents the rise of diabetes and obesity in urban India in clinics, street food stalls, and home kitchens.
I currently am writing a collaborative ethnography of the lives and labors of an American intensive care unit during COVID-19.
Here are there, I write fiction, opinion pieces, and narrative non-fiction. I write a newsletter, too.
I teach in the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University.