I’m an urban ethnographer with research and teaching specializations in the sociology of gender, culture, and inequality, as well as in social psychology and the social dimensions of disasters. My doctoral research focused on a women’s group that played an instrumental role in rebuilding the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina. In 2009, I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of the Philippines in Manila, where I spent several months conducting ethnographic fieldwork on gender, culture, and postcolonial identity formation. In August 2010, I will join the Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice at Villanova University as an Assistant Professor.