I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology and International Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research interests include race/racism, refugees and immigration, political sociology, and Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. I am the Faculty Coordinator of the Wisconsin Collective for Ethnographic Research (WISCER), and a Faculty Affiliate of Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies. I am also a Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Fellow (2022-2023) at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at UW-Madison.

My book The Color of Asylum: The Racial Politics of Safe Haven in Brazil is forthcoming September 2023 at the University of Chicago Press. You can learn more about it here.

My work is published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Qualitative Sociology, American Behavioral Scientist, Social Currents, and City & Community, among other academic journals and books. I have appeared in media outlets like The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Austin American-Statesman, and Clarín. My research has been funded by the Fulbright Commission, P.E.O. International, and the U.S. Department of Education, among others.

I earned a PhD in Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, with a Doctoral Portfolio in African and African Diaspora Studies. At UT-Austin, I was a Graduate Fellow of the Urban Ethnography Lab, and an Affiliate of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. I am a former Fulbright Fellow and P.E.O. Scholar. Before joining UW, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Center for Inter-American Policy & Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. I earned a BA in Latin American and Latino/a Studies from Vassar College. Before pursuing my PhD, I lived and conducted research in Buenos Aires, Argentina with the support of a Maguire Fellowship.