About

My dissertation research considers the ongoing colonial histories and effects of industrial fishing nets made from monofilament plastic that have been lost and abandoned around the island of Newfoundland. Known globally as ghost nets, I seek out the social and political histories of these lost nets, investigating the ways they entangle individual lives and multispecies communities with rural development schemes and larger histories of resource extraction in the Atlantic world. By thinking with ghost nets, I ask what it means to live today in the wake of environmental disaster and what it might take to support rural resource dependent communities in the present. I have found a home for these questions in sociocultural anthropology and I am currently a PhD candidate in the Yale University anthropology department.

This work is guided by my broader interest in the relationship between social inequality and environmental change. As an educator, I co-designed and taught a Yale College anthropology seminar entitled Inequality and the Anthropocene: Thinking the Unthinkable. I have also served as a Teaching Fellow for Yale College seminars Inequality in America and Multispecies Worlds. Each of these courses fosters conversations about the profound intersectionality of inequality and environmental change. To facilitate these conversations, I am a Pedagogy Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

With the support of the Fulbright Foundation and the National Geographic Society, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork, worked on fishing boats, and recorded oral histories in small fishing communities of New Brunswick, Canada, Midcoast Maine, USA, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the Shetland Islands in Scotland. I am excited by the environmental humanities more broadly, and I strive to communicate my research beyond academia through art, creative nonfiction writing, and my continued involvement with the National Geographic Society as a community hub coordinator for women and non-binary people working in anthropology, archeology, and related fields.

I am also a visiting graduate student in the geography department of Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.