I am a fourth year PhD candidate in the University of Pennsylvania’s joint program in Anthropology and Music, where I am advised by Professors Jairo Moreno and Kristina Lyons. In 2022, I completed the Graduate Certificate in Experimental Ethnography.
My research examines the interrelations of value, materiality, and sound in contemporary instrument making worlds in the United States and Europe. Specifically, I ask how late capitalist financial valuation emerges in relation to aesthetic evaluation in the international circulation of violins, violas, and cellos. My multi-sited ethnographic research focuses on the experiences of violinmakers, instrument dealers, and their musician customers in New York City, in Boston, and in Cremona, Italy, a historic and contemporary center for violinmaking. I employ a range of theoretical frameworks from sound studies, feminist science studies, semiotic anthropology, and the social life of things. I also use multimodal research methods, including sonic ethnography, to ask: what can we learn about evaluative processes by listening differently?
Other areas of interest include music and heritage, klezmer and other Jewish musics, sound and environmental destruction, the anthropology of craft, and linguistic anthropology.
Before coming to UPenn, I graduated from Yale University in 2016 with a B.A. with honors in Anthropology. I am also a violinist and old-time fiddler.
My research during the 2022-2023 academic year is supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. I am also a UPenn Benjamin Franklin Fellow.