I am an anthropologist interested in all things language, culture, and nature. For many years I’ve been working with a small indigenous group of hunter-gatherers, the Aché in eastern Paraguay, on topics such as language shift and endangerment, child socialization, and human–nonhuman relations. In my research I use video to document and analyze everyday interactions, exploring how children become aware of differences between languages, of the moral norms of their society, and of the physical environments they inhabit. I also incorporate these topics into many of the courses I teach. Learn more about my research and teaching.
I hold a PhD in linguistic anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MA in sociocultural anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. I also spent one year at the Universidade de São Paulo (USP) in Brazil as the recipient of a DAAD UNIBRAL fellowship. I am currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, a postdoctoral researcher in the Geography of Philosophy Project at UCLA, as well as a visiting fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich.