Campus Directory

Pronouns he/him

Division Social Sciences Division

Department/College/Unit Latin American & Latino Studies

Title Assistant Professor & Undergraduate Program Committee Chair

Affiliation Faculty

Other UCSC Campus Affiliation Dolores Huerta Research Center for the Americas
Global & Community Health

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Primary Office Location Merrill College Academic Building

Office Hours for Students/ Office Hours Spring 2026: Thursdays, 9:00am-11:00am (Zoom, Email for Link)

Mail Stop Merrill/Crown Faculty Services

Biography, Education and Training

PhD, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine (2017)

MA, Anthropology, University of California, Irvine (2013)

BA, Anthropology, University of Notre Dame (2011)

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, 2025) 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 am currently co-chair of the Health, Science, and Technology Section of the Latin American Studies Association.

Selected Publications

Queer Emergent: Scandalous Stories from the Twilight of AIDS in Peru (Duke University Press, 2025)

• WINNER Flora Tristan Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association Peru Section 

• HONARABLE MENTION Ruth Benedict Book Prize, Association for Queer Anthropology 

• Reviewed in Anthropological Quarterly, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, and Journal of Latin American Studies. 

Selected additional publications include:

Beyond the 'end of AIDS': What comes after 2030? Global Public Health (2026)

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

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

Peche problems: Transactional sex, moral imaginaries, and the "end of AIDS" in postconflict Peru. American Ethnologist (2022)  

• WINNER Carlos Monsiváis Award, Latin American Studies Association Sexualities Studies Section

Un juego de palabras e insultos: El vóliebol como una práctica cotidiana queer en el Perú. Deabtes en Sociología (2020)

Contact for a complete list.