Faculty

Summary of Expertise

Disciplinary areas: anthropology; sexuality, queer, and gender studies; critical global health

Topic areas: HIV/AIDS; sexual cultures; queer worldmaking; discrimination and stigma; migration; ethnographic methods; Peru and urban Amazonia

Research Interests

My program of research is fundamentally driven by questions about how transformations in the ongoing global HIV/AIDS epidemic shape the experiences and social worlds of communities most vulnerable to it. As an anthropologist, I base my approach and response to these questions through my long-term ethnographic collaboration with queer communities in Peru. My book Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru (Duke University Press, forthcoming) examines the impasses and predicaments that gay and transgender communities in urban Amazonian Peru encounter as the global ambition to “end AIDS” transforms their collective social worlds. Focusing on an everyday narrative practice that emphasizes exaggeration and embellishment—or what I term scandalous storytelling—I show how through these stories gay and transgender communities make visible and meaningfully contest the limits and contradictions of the project to “end AIDS” as it unfurls in their lives. I have published articles and book chapters regarding the enduring inequalities of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Peru that attend to intersectional concerns including ethno-racial hierarchies, gendered vulnerabilities, discrimination, transactional sex, the legacies of political violence, and the emergence of LGBT rights movements in Peru’s Amazonian region.

Biography, Education and Training

I received my PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine in 2017. Prior to joining the Latin American and Latino Studies Department as an Assistant Professor, I was a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in LALS (2017) and held the Fund for Reunion-Cotsen Fellowship in LGBT Studies in the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at Princeton University (2017-2019).

Honors, Awards and Grants

Selected Grants and Fellowships

UC Underrepresented Scholars Fellowship, University of California Humanities Research Institute (2024-25)

Hellman Fellowship, UC Santa Cruz Hellman Society (2021-22) 

Research Program on Migration and Health Binational Team Project, Health Initiative of the Americas (2020-22)

Faculty Research Award, Research Center for the Americas (2019-20)

William Hallam Tuck ’12 Memorial Fund Research Grant, Princeton University (2018)

Queer Hemisphere/América Queer Residential Research Group, University of California Humanities Research Institute (2016)

International Dissertation Research Fellowship, Social Science Research Council (2014-15)

Grassroots Development Ph.D. Fellowship, Inter-American Foundation (2014-15)

Graduate Research Fellowship Program Fellow, National Science Foundation (2012-17)

Awards
Premio Carlos Monsiváis, LASA Sexualities Studies Section (2023)

Kenneth W. Payne Prize, AAA Association for Queer Anthropology (2014)

Selected Publications

What do we do to learn collaborative visual analysis for ethnographic practice? In Communities of Practice and Ethnographic Fieldwork: Creating Supportive Research Experiences, eds. Lee Cabatingan, Susan Bibler Coutin, and Deyanira Nevárez Martínez. New York: Routledge (2025)

Kinship by Coincidence: Episodes of arrival in travesti and transfeminine migration across Amazonian Peru. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (2024)

Sexualities in Latin America and the Caribbean, with Florence Babb. In Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies, ed. Ben Vinson. New York: Oxford University Press (2024)

Peche problems: Transactional sex, moral imaginaries, and the "end of AIDS" in postconflict Peru. American Ethnologist (2022)  WINNER Carlos Monsiváis Award for best article in the social sciences and history, Latin American Studies Association Sexualities Studies Section

Scandalous denouncement: Discrimination, difference, and queer scandal in urban Amazonian Peru. Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies (2022)

Un juego de palabras e insultos: el vóleibol como una práctica cotidiana queer en el Perú. Debates en Sociología (2020) English (2011)

Global LGBT Politics at Scale: Memory and Rights in Early Twenty-First Century Peru, in The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Politics, eds. Michael Bosia, Sandra McEvoy, and Momin Rahman, 89-102. New York: Oxford University Press (2020) Spanish (2023)

“Virtual Hagiography and Sexual Rights: The Case of Daniel Zamudio,” in Sexual Diversity and Religious Systems: Transnational Dialogues in the Contemporary World, ed. Martin Jaime, 249-263. Lima, Peru: CMP Flora Tristán/UNMSM (2017)