I am an Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles. My teaching and research focus on religion in the Americas, with particular attention to the United States and Brazil. I am interested in how people use religion to confront urban affliction. My earlier research examines how the ritualized engagement of the dead—whether through mediumship, prayers, ghost hunting, or memorialization—shapes the city of São Paulo. Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil (UNC Press, 2025—use code 10SOCIAL30 for 30% off), explores this theme through an ethnography of a practice known as the devotion to souls (devoção às almas) or cult of the souls (culto das almas). Aimed toward a broad scholarly audience, the book addresses broader questions that I see as central to the story of religion in the Americas, such as how modernization produces uneven opportunities, uneven economic development, and patterns of social violence that haunt—figuratively and literally—contemporary urban spaces.

My research for Moved by the Dead led to ongoing work with two activist collectives in São Paulo: UNAMCA (the União dos Amigos da Capela dos Aflitos/Union of the Friends of the Chapel of the Afflicted) and the broader Movimento dos Aflitos (Movement of the Afflicted). Both organizations work to recover, preserve, and in some ways “construct” Afro-Indigenous memory in Liberdade, a “Japanese” neighborhood in central São Paulo.

My current project, tentatively titled Constructing Religion, builds on my earlier work to rethink urban religion through a focus on cultural heritage. Through fieldwork with religious actors, urban planners, activists, and patrimonial institutions in São Paulo, I examine how religion is made legible, mobilized, or contested within heritage processes and urban development. The project begins by foregrounding modern urbanism’s religious genealogies. From there, it draws on research in urban Brazil to center cultural heritage as a key technology for translating religious value into spatial practice. By attending to the ways that religion remains embedded in or is excised from planning institutions and patrimonial policy today, the project asks how religion informs the principles by which urban space is ordered, valued, and governed, as well as how “heritage makers” alternately mobilize and contest these principles in making claims on the city.

I received my Ph.D. in Religious Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2017. I also hold an M.A. in History of Religions from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Religion Studies and Psychology from Lehigh University. Before arriving at Occidental College, I was a visiting professor in religion at Oberlin College (2017-2018) and Amherst College (2018-2019). I was born and raised in northern New Jersey.