Area of Interest:

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Anthropology broadly interested in relationships between people and the environment past and present. My dissertation project examines how landscapes around the Panama Canal have been reorganized through environmental management over the past century, particularly through projects designed to provide the Canal with a continuous supply of fresh water. Thus, the Panama Canal Watershed – the drainage basin that feeds the Canal – is my principal field site. During 2008 and 2009, I conducted eighteen months of ethnographic and archival research on the changing relationships among people (smallholder agriculturalists, development professionals, watershed scientists), non-human actors (trees, cargo ships, dams), and the institutions that connect them to one another and the Canal. My previous research in Ecuador also explored environmental themes anthropologically, including: the politics and economics of eucalyptus plantation forestry in highland Quichua communities and the relationships between natural resource allocations and market integration in lowland Amazonian indigenous communities.