I wear many hats, but whether in the field or in academic and organizational contexts, my pursuits are held together by a drive to understand the materiality of sociocultural transformation over time. By anthropologically and archaeologically tracing dynamic movements in the past and emergences in the present, I exercise strategic foresight and intuit how things might be otherwise in the future.

I am a PhD Candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago. I conduct my archaeological fieldwork at Smythe, an abandoned iron mining camp in Birmingham, Alabama, which is where I am presently based. My dissertation explores the material worlds of Black subcontract miners and their families across the turn of the twentieth century at Smythe. In my research, I attend to questions of racialized, extractive labor regimes and the ways their different configurations condition the generation of distinct material outputs that might be amenable to archaeological scrutiny.

While writing my dissertation, I also work part time as the lead design research analyst at Quire Consulting, a research and strategy firm in Birmingham that leverages human-centered design protocols to help purpose-driven organizations maximize their social impact. At Quire, I have had the opportunity to lead analysis on research and strategic planning projects with large cities, nonprofits, a community foundation, and a federal agency. The projects on which I have worked have supported racial justice efforts in Alabama.