BIO

I am a medical and psychological anthropologist specializing in the study of mental health and psychic life. My research is based in the Nepal Himalayas and the United States, where I explore the ethics and politics of psychic life in times of crisis.

Relational Affliction
In 2014, I began fieldwork in Nepal with a project focused on the phenomenon of “mass hysteria” and the transfer of affect among teenage girls in rural schools. Such cases were a contested object of psychosocial intervention in rural communities–while counselors drew on theories of “conversion disorder” and somatization, communities and afflicted girls often insisted that the affliction was a form of ghostly haunting. For anthropology, “mass hysteria” poses interesting challenges to how we think about a form of affliction and experience that is de-centered from the individual, and instead transfers through a group or arises in relation to the environment. Based on this work, I’ve published articles on relational affliction, ghosts, psychosomatic disorders, and the problem of interpretation.

The Work of Disaster
On April 25, 2015, halfway through my fieldwork, Nepal was struck by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake. The event radically reconfigured the therapeutic landscape and my understanding of the field. Faced with the challenge of making anthropology immediately useful, I began to work in a collaborative mode as an ethnographic consultant with a local NGO on a post-disaster psychosocial intervention program. In this part of my fieldwork I followed the public articulation of a “mental health crisis” in the aftermath of the disaster; its strategic uses, ethical demands, and unexpected consequences. Based on this research I published my first book, The Work of Disaster: Crisis and Care along a Himalayan Fault Line, with the University of Chicago Press in 2025.

Ethical Substance
My current work builds on my research on mental health and psychic life by exploring the “psychedelic renaissance” and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in the United States. While psychiatry is rapidly expanding throughout the Global South, in the Global North increasing dissatisfaction with the efficacy of SSRIs and psychiatric treatment modalities has inspired a flood of new research on psychedelic plant medicine to treat addiction, anxiety, PTSD, and depression. The widespread enthusiasm for psychedelic medicine is striking, especially given that for substances such as psilocybin, therapeutic efficacy is strongly correlated with the presence of “mystical experience.” With support from the John Templeton Foundation, Ethical Substance brings together perspectives in anthropology, psychiatry, philosophy, theology, and religious studies to explore the incorporation of spiritual experiences into the lives of secular Americans and their therapeutic practices.

In 2021, I joined the faculty of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to this, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Virginia. Since 2018 I have been a Research Associate at the Centre d’anthropologie culturelle (CANTHEL) at Université Paris Cité, where I collaborate with researchers studying grief, mourning, and medical pluralism in South Asia. My research has been supported by grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the UC Chancellor’s Prize, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and the Foundation for Psychocultural Research, among others.

I received my PhD in Anthropology from UCLA in 2018, my MA in Anthropology from UCLA in 2012, and my BA in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009.