CURRENT RESEARCH

I am an Africanist with experience using mixed methods for theoretical and applied research. I work primarily with Bantu-speaking Maravi populations (Nyanja, Yao, Chewa, Macua) in northern Mozambique and Malawi.

My topical interests center on the study of foodways as an important factor in physical and mental health, a location for creative and critical response to historical and political conditions, and a set of behaviors with which identity and sociality are embodied, produced, and made meaningful through everyday routine. I am currently focusing on individual actors’ navigations of food-related choices and related healthcare decisions as associated with attempts to achieve social mobility and a “good life” in the increasingly stratified and alienating environment that characterizes contemporary Mozambique, as well as the nutrition transition through which larger bodies are coming to be associated negatively with health problems. 

I am additionally interested in exploring the Niassa Corridor region, linking Malawi and Mozambique via steamer across Lake Niassa, and the role of Malawian commercial products (particularly food and Malawian produced and dubbed foreign films) in promoting linguistic and cultural heritage preservation.

Additional Research Interests

DNA


​With the rise of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, what are the implications for cultural conceptions of family and kinship? What are the bioethics of donor-conceived children locating and identifying biological parents?

Anthropometry

At the turn of the 20th century, anthropologists sought to preserve biological diversity and document racial "types." My research focuses on the 1914 expedition of Czech anthropologist Vojtech Suk to South Africa to collect facial casts for the Panama-California Exposition (San Diego, 1915)

Jamaica

Through participation in a faculty-led study abroad program run through my current employer, CSUSB, I have become interested in plantations as historical sites, and the ways in which slavery is engaged, ignored, and subversively introduced to tourists by docents and site owners.