My research interests converge around how various forms of social and bodily precariousness are experienced as part of ordinary life and also how lives marked by violence or suffering become seen as something other than ordinary. I explore these questions in relation to war, violence, and trauma; bodies and their normative physical and social configurations; modes of representing post-traumatic life in science and public culture. I am currently developing these interests as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University’s Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research.

My ethnographic research focuses on the experiences of U.S. soldiers whose social and material selves and worlds are marked by the many violences of war. This work has also led me to think about the ways in which images of injured and imminently injurable soldiers circulate to particular publics; ethical dimensions of being in the world among others in the midst of intense vulnerability; and the relationship of solitude to sociality possibilities of being alone in common. 

I am currently developing a new project that critically examines the traumatic flashback as an encompassing genre of experience rather than a narrowly defined medicalized symptom. I’m especially interested in how the emphasis on the visual in clinical and popular representations of the flashback positions it at the intersection of the history of pathological memory and the innovation of aesthetic technologies that mediate experience, especially photography.

My dissertation Emergent Ordinaries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center: An ethnography of extra/ordinary encounter draws on a year of fieldwork based at Walter Reed in Washington D.C. (2007-8) and was supported by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. In it, I work through the extra/ordinary to convey the particular ways in which war marks the lives, and the possibilities of living, for injured soldiers and their families. Grounded in the textures of this vertiginous moment, Emergent Ordinaries troubles, and also notes the force of, frames of patriotic sacrifice, heroism, and trauma, within which the violence of war is made sensible in post 9/11 America.

My fieldwork at Walter Reed is supplemented by interviews and fieldwork at other sites in Washington D.C. as well as sort-term fieldwork at the Army’s Fort Dix in New Jersey (2007), and Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. military installation in southern Germany (2006).