My work intersects critical agrarian studies, political ecology, and anthropology, and I build interdisciplinary collaborations to find creative approaches to entrenched food system problems in the United States. Beyond food systems, my research and teaching interests include alternative economies, human-environment relations, policy and political economy, and qualitative methods.
I believe that longitudinal, connected research cultivates unique insights into how food systems function and change. I have been researching and working in U.S. agriculture since 2008. After graduating from Grinnell College in Iowa, I worked on multiple farms in eastern Iowa and at the University of Northern Iowa to facilitate partnerships between local food producers and institutional buyers. I also spent several months conducting on-farm research in New Zealand in 2011-12.
After receiving my PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2019, I served as the President's Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Environment and Natural Resources at The Ohio State University. As a member of the Center for Community and Working Landscapes, I helped launch and analyze the inaugural Ohio Farm Poll and collaborated with the National Farm Medicine Center on research about the role of childcare on farms. From 2021-2022, I brought an anthropological perspective to the FACES Lab in the Emory Department of Environmental Sciences and led qualitative research on trajectories of agricultural diversification in rural North Carolina.