Scholarly Research

I received my PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill in 2014. My research focuses on the long aftermath of the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti, especially how people experience and navigate displacement and humanitarian aid.

I am interested in everyday life amid crisis — on telling a story of the earthquake from the perspective of a porch, a side kitchen, or a narrow bed in a displacement camp.

An improvised structure becomes a space to view the World Cup.

Photo: Laura Wagner, Port-au-Prince, 2010

As both a survivor of the earthquake and a scholar of it, I have an intimate and acute perspective on the before, during, and after phases of the disaster.

You can read more about my experience of the earthquake here, or hear my story about being rescued from the rubble by my friends and neighbors here.

Available online

“Haiti Beyond Crisis” (Cultural Anthropology Fieldsights, 2022) (with Greg Beckett)

“Something to Laugh About: A Few Thoughts on Humor in Post-Earthquake Haiti” (published in the thankfully-renamed Savage Minds blog in 2011)

Other academic work

I have contributed to edited volumes, including Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice (2015) and Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010 (2010).

I am currently on the board of the Haitian Studies Association, where I lead the ad hoc Public Scholarship & Engagement committee.