Biography

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.  I serve as Chair of the Anthropology Department Programme Committee, and am a member of the AISSR research programme group, Moving Matters.

In 2023, I was awarded an NWO Advancing Equity Academia Grant as Principal Investigator of the consortium project, Disrupting Sameness in Dutch Academia, a diversity, equity, and inclusion project that researches how "sameness" is reproduced and maintained as a mechanism of professionalization and privilege in university settings, with the goal of developing interventions with institutional and societal stakeholders to disrupt that sameness and create more inclusive and diverse universities. Find out more about our project and the team here: https://disruptingsamenessindutchacademia.nl.

Education

PhD: Anthropology, Yale University; MPhil: Anthropology, Yale University; BA: Literature and French Studies, Duke University.

Research

I have two research streams: one is a on diversity, equity, and inclusion in Dutch universities, and especially in how to redress the underrepresentation of minoritized ethnic groups in academia. The other is my longstanding research interests in art markets, creative labor, and value, especially in Asian contexts. I have conducted fieldwork in Mumbai, Tokyo, and New York City. Her research focuses on how the production and circulation of art are shaped by the market and on artistic labor. Her ongoing writing on the Mumbai art ecosystem examines marketization’s impacts since the 2000s onwards on the production and circulation of fine art, transformations in art infrastructure, as well as market influences on artists and artistic careers and how artists negotiate these. She is also the author of Japanese New York: Migrant artists and self-reinvention on the world stage (2014), an ethnographic study of Japanese artists and the links between migration, creative work, and self-reinvention.

Courses taught

Current

• Anthropological Research Methods (Bachelors Anthropology)
• Anthropology of East Asia (Bachelors Anthropology)
• Writing Ethnography (MA Anthropology)
• Tutorial Group, (MA Anthropology)

Past

• Working with Fieldwork Data, Research Masters Social Sciences
• East and Central Asia, MsC Contemporary Asian Studies
• Anthropology of Modern Asia 
• Youth Cultures in Transnational Context (ISW)
• Youth: Contemporary Debates (ISW)
• Age, City, Work (ISW)
• BA Thesis class (ISW)
• Urban Anthropology (Bachelors Anthropology)
• Asian Cities
• Introduction to East Asia: Powerhouse and Politics

Supervision

I am interested in supervising students with research interests in art, material culture, value, art markets, cultural production, and creative labor. 

In addition to masters supervision, I currently co-supervise the following PhD students:

• Sarita Jarmack (Johannesburg art world, Anthropology, with Eileen Moyer)
• Andrea Friedmann Rozenbaum (Private museums in Brazil, Sociology, with Olav Velthuis)
• Joanna Lu (Chinese migrant artists in the Netherlands, Anthropology, with Eileen Moyer)
• Zaydoun Hajjar (Levantine musicians in Berlin, with Shanshan Lan)