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he/him
Social Sciences Division
Latin American & Latino Studies
Assistant Professor
Faculty
Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Global & Community Health
Regular Faculty
Merrill College Academic Building
Spring 2025: Contact for office hours
Merrill/Crown Faculty Services
PhD, Anthropology (University of California, Irvine)
My program of research is fundamentally driven by questions about how transformations in the ongoing global HIV/AIDS epidemic shape the experiences and social worlds of communities most vulnerable to it. As an anthropologist, I base my approach and response to these questions through my long-term ethnographic collaboration with queer communities in Peru. My book Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru (Duke University Press, 2025) examines the impasses and predicaments that gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru encounter as the global ambition to “end AIDS” transforms their collective social worlds. Focusing on an everyday narrative practice that emphasizes exaggeration and embellishment—or what I term scandalous storytelling—I show how through these stories gay and transgender communities make visible and meaningfully contest the limits and contradictions of the project to “end AIDS” as it unfurls in their lives.
Some recent publications include:
What do we do to learn collaborative visual analysis for ethnographic practice? In Communities of Practice and Ethnographic Fieldwork: Creating Supportive Research Experiences, eds. Lee Cabatingan, Susan Bibler Coutin, and Deyanira Nevárez Martínez. New York: Routledge (2025)
Kinship by Coincidence: Episodes of arrival in travesti and transfeminine migration across Amazonian Peru. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (2024)
Peche problems: Transactional sex, moral imaginaries, and the "end of AIDS" in postconflict Peru. American Ethnologist (2022) WINNER Carlos Monsiváis Award for best article in the social sciences and history, Latin American Studies Association Sexualities Studies Section
Scandalous denouncement: Discrimination, difference, and queer scandal in urban Amazonian Peru. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (2022)
Contact for a complete list.
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