I am a socio-cultural anthropologist with long-term ethnographic commitments in the Himalayas and South Asia (Nepal, India, and Tibetan areas of China), and emerging research in British Columbia, Canada. I  serve as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology as well as in UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs (SPPGA)/Institute of Asian Research (IAR). From 2025-2030, I am honoured to hold the Ivan Head South-North IDRC Chair at SPPGA. In this role I am working to convene students, scholars, and practitioners from across the Global South and North to share scholarship and best practices in the fields of disaster resilience, migration, and Indigenous futures. I also serve as Co-Lead of the UBC Disaster Resilience Research Network and UBC Himalaya Program.

Broadly speaking, my research explores how social transformation is shaped by dynamics of citizenship and belonging (in relation to Indigenous, ethnic, religious and gender identities); cross-border mobility; conflict and political mobilization; territory and land use; development discourses and practices; and disaster aftermath and preparedness.

Current writing and research projects include Restructuring Life: Conflict, Disaster and Transformation in Nepal, an ethnography of the twin processes of post-conflict state restructuring and post-disaster reconstruction in Nepal from the perspective of lived experience in the hill district of Dolakha; and mixed methods research about community-based disaster preparedness in British Columbia, Canada, conducted in collaboration with the provincial Ministry of Emergency Management and Climate Readiness (EMCR), the City of Vancouver Emergency Management Agency, and UBC’s Office of Emergency Management through the Campus as a Living Labs initiative.

Recently completed collaborative research engagements include serving as Principal Investigator for “Expertise, Labour, and Mobility in Nepal’s Post-Conflict, Post-Disaster Reconstruction“, a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant; Co-Investigator for “Infrastructures of Democracy: State Building as Everyday Practice“, a University of Toronto-based SSHRC Insight Grant; Co-Investigator in the Durham University-based Sajag-Nepal partnership about landsliding and disaster preparedness in Nepal; and collaboration in the Yale University-based “Urban Himalaya” project on urbanization and land use change in the Himalayas.

My first book is titled Rituals of Ethnicity: Thangmi Identities Between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). An ethnography focusing on the cross-border circulation of Thangmi people and their ideas about ethnic, national, religious and political identity, Rituals of Ethnicity offers new explanations for the powerful persistence of ethnicity as a category of identification today despite the increasing realities of mobile, translocal lives. The book is based on over a decade of ethnographic research with diverse members of the Thangmi community in the Dolakha and Sindhupalchok districts of central-eastern Nepal, as well as in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal, India, and the neighboring state of Sikkim. All royalties from the sale of the book are donated to organizations supporting Thangmi communities of Dolakha and Sindhupalchok to rebuild after the 2015 earthquakes devastated their villages.

Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments (Oxford University Press, 2018) is a volume that I co-edited with Townsend Middleton (University of North Carolina). I have also published several articles on the themes of Nepal’s Maoist movement; ethnic classification, affirmative action, and the politics of recognition in South Asia; and borders and citizenship in the Himalaya. I am currently preparing another manuscript that presents Thangmi ritual texts in Nepali and English translation. This is a collaborative project with an indigenous Thangmi researcher, a Nepali translator, and a linguistic anthropologist.

Multimedia technologies are at the core of my ethnographic methodology, and I am a founding member of the Digital Himalaya Project.

I received my PhD (2009) and MA (2004) from Cornell University, following a BA with Honors from Brown University in both Anthropology and Religious Studies (1997). Before coming to UBC I was an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and South Asian Studies at Yale University from 2011-2014, and a Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, from 2009-2011. My research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation, the British Academy, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and several programs at UBC including: the Hampton Fund, the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, the Fostering Research Partnerships Fund, and the Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters Program.