ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow
I'm a social anthropologist. I focus on political, medical, and urban anthropology and I'm interested in the interaction of the body with politics and medicine. My research focuses on death, care, ritual, memory, absence and forgetting, citizens and the state, law and policy, massed graves, and memorialization. I have published on death rituals; the Crown, sovereignty, and constitutional reform in Commonwealth settler societies; and austerity in Europe.
My doctoral research focused on Hart Island, New York City's massed grave for its unknown, unclaimed, and poor. This fieldwork coincided with the first and second waves of Covid-19 in New York. Approximately a million people have been buried on Hart Island since 1869 in unmarked trenches. It still operates today, burying about 1,500 New Yorkers each year. The island is uninhabited, and until 2020 all the work was performed by inmates from nearby Rikers Island Prison. Burials occur without ceremony or memorialisation. For decades, public access was prohibited, and it remains difficult for mourners to visit. I examine how the phenomena of contemporary mass burial can be made tolerable, or even ordinary; how, if burial acts out a person's political claims of belonging, citizenship can survive death; and how the curious case of Hart Island speaks both to studies of massed graves following conflict, and to historical paupers' burials.
My current project on lonely funerals examines the relationships prompted by changes to how people die. When someone dies without anyone to take care of them, is that because they have no social relations, or because their relationships are not recognised? Again, I analyse dislocations of death to ask, what does death reveal about social life?
Previously I was a Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate in social anthropology at Cambridge, a research fellow at the University of Auckland, and a Teaching Fellow (lecturer) at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington. I am a Churchill Fellow (New Zealand, 2010).
I am a member of the Afterlives Network, a collaborative group of scholars, activists, and practitioners focused on understand the social and political impacts of the missing and the dead.
