I am currently Assistant Professor of Global Politics at Cal Poly Humboldt. I received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Prior to joining the faculty at Humboldt, I was Assistant Professor of Diaspora Studies, Human Rights, and Transnational Migration at Miami University, Ohio. My research and teaching interests span the subdisciplines of political ethnography, critical political theory, Asian cultural studies, mobilities studies, performance studies, and international relations with a particular emphasis on refugee politics in Southeast Asia.

I grew up in an immigrant community in Oslo, Norway, where I became interested in how exiled groups form senses of belonging in the diaspora. I have spent over two years conducting ethnographic research along the Thai-Myanmar border with migrants and refugees who have fled the civil war in Burma. As a practitioner of dance, one way I engage my research community is through practice and performance. My in-progress book manuscript, Aesthetic Nationalism: The Dance of War and Exile along the Thai-Myanmar Border, is based on embedded field research in Northern Thailand, where I conducted ethnographic and archival research with Tai refugees from Myanmar. My research has recently received funding from The Fulbright U.S. Scholar ASEAN Program and I was awarded the 2022 McCrone Faculty Scholar Award for Research. My work has appeared in Critique of Anthropology, the Review of Human Rights, Political Geography, and in various edited volumes.