I am a professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. My research interests include Southeast Asia, capitalism, commodities, corporations, international development, extractive industries, and tobacco.

My first book, Enacting the Corporation: An American Mining Firm in Postauthoritarian Indonesia(University of California Press, 2014), applied anthropological theories of personhood and social studies of the state to the corporation, and was based on two years of ethnographic research on a Denver-based gold mining firm and its Indonesian operation.

My second book, Kretek Capitalism: Making, Marketing, and Consuming Clove Cigarettes in Indonesia (University of California Press, 2024), is a labor- and commodity-centered ethnographic study of Sampoerna, an Indonesian subsidiary of Philip Morris International.

I have published articles in American Ethnologist, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Seattle University Law Review. My research has been supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren, National Science Foundation, Fulbright IIE, and Fulbright-Hays.

Courses I have taught include Cigarette Cultures; Economy, Power, and Inequality; Cultural Diversity and Contemporary Issues; Ethnographies of Development; The Corporation; Power, Culture, and Society in Southeast Asia; and Risk Work.