About Me

I am a cultural anthropologist at Harvard University, where for the past several years I have been teaching faculty in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, an interdisciplinary honors program in the social sciences and humanities. My research focuses on the relationship between the movement of texts and the movement of peoples. For the past ten years, I have been conducting fieldwork with writers, translators, cultural officials, booksellers and publishers in Germany examining the micropolitical conditions under which life is made literary. My current book project, A World of Ciphers, tracks the various ways literature is integral to the ways people ordinarily think and talk about how language works, and ultimately to the production and maintenance of a bordering regime. I also write on the inheritances of Romanticism in ordinary language philosophy, and in the history of anthropology.

Prior to coming to Harvard, I was a Visiting Fellow of the European Institute for Advanced Study in Vienna, the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. I hold a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology all from The Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD), where I taught as a Dean's Teaching Fellow and curated the Sidney W. Mintz Collection as the inaugural University Archives Fellow. I have also taught as Adjunct Professor in History and Society at Babson College (Wellsey, MA), where I offered a lecture course on the European literature.