About me

Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  IMG_4498 - Version 2

A quick academic summary runs as follows: Trained as a cultural anthropologist sympathetic to history, I concentrate on circulations of science and technology in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The author of Life in Crisis: The Ethical Journey of Doctors Without Borders (California 2013) and Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana (University of California Press, 2000), I also co-edited of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (SAR Press, 2011), and have been a recipient of the Cultural Horizons Prize of the Society for Cultural Anthropology.  I am currently working on collaborative projects related to humanitarian design.