I am currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. Previously, I was Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University. I have also had the privilege of working as an instructor at the University of California San Diego, CUNY Hunter College, and the City College of New York and as a Visiting Foreign Researcher in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Tokyo. Additionally, I have taught at a wonderful community college and a prison. I hold a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California San Diego and a master’s degree in social sciences from the University of Chicago.

Working at the intersections of liberal secularism, capitalism, and language, I research ways that people become separated from each other in their very attempts to connect to the world and to suffering others. My research links broad questions about the nature of form, relations, generality, and history to questions posed at the level of experience and interaction. More specifically, I ask why it is sometimes difficult to sustain meaningful relationships despite the desire to do so; how the processes involved in creating something meaningful, like a religion or humanitarian movement, sometimes lead to its undoing; and why many people come to feel isolated despite being surrounded in their daily lives by other people at work, school, or even on the street. Those questions, which have long fueled social scientific inquiry, have led me to conduct long-term, in-depth research on the relationship between alienation, compassion, and forms of society.

On the ground, I work with religious professionals in Japan, a society long characterized by forms of group belonging maintained by hierarchy, reciprocity, dependence, and a strong sense of social obligation. Recently, however, scholars and reporters in Japan have noted that these types of bonds have weakened, producing a “relationless society” of people who don’t feel meaningfully connected to each other. My writing looks at whether either — or both — of those descriptions capture contemporary social relations. I contribute to debates in anthropology, Japanese studies, and religious studies by arguing that forms of compassion, belonging, and alienation are co-constituted aspects of governance, particularly in secularist, liberal democracies such as Japan.