Educational Background

• B.A., Wesleyan
• M.A. and a Ph.D., Michigan University at Ann Arbor

Research Interests

• Women's and Gender Studies
• Anthropology
• Feminist Theory/Method
• Folklore Studies
• Transnational Studies
• Critical Development
• Expressive Practices (folklore)
• South Asia
• Nepal

Courses

• WMST 150 (Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies)
• WMST 220 (Introduction to Feminist Theory in Practice)
• WMST 251 (Women and Development)
• WMST 270 (Gender in Culture, Power in Identity)
• WMST/SOCI 332 (Women and the Penal System)
• WMST/ANTH 273 (Women Writing Culture)

Selected Publications

Maithil Women’s Tales: Storytelling on the Nepal-India Border  University of Illinois Press, 2014.

“Transnational Marriage: Modern Imaginings, Relational Realignments, and Persistent Inequalities.” Ethnos Journal of Anthropology (2013), special guest-edited issue on Tracing Sexualities and Intimacies in Out-of-the-Way Places, web published: 1-25.

“How Porous are the Walls that Separate Us? Feminist Pedagogy, Incarceration, and Disseminating Knowledge.” Co-author, Carol Wayne White. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations(special issue on Social Justice Action, Teaching and Research) (2012), vol 34:85-104.

"Talking Tools, Suffering Servants, and Defecating Men: The Power of Storytelling in Maithil Women's Tales." Journal of American Folklore (2009) vol. 122 (485): 267-296.

"Im/possible Lives: Gender, Class, Self-Fashioning, and Affinal Solidarity in Modern South Asia." Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (2009) vol. 15 (2): 243-272.

"Pond-Women Revelations: The Subaltern Registers in Maithil Women's Expressive Forms." Journal of American Folklore(2008) vol. 121 (481):286-318.

"Can Developing Women Create Primitive Art? and Other Questions of  Value, Meaning and Identity in the Circulation of Janakpur Art." Tourist Studies (2007) vol. 7 (2): 193-223.

"'Listen, Rama's Wife!': Maithil Women's Perspectives and Practices in the Festival of Sāmā Cakevā." Asian Folklore Studies(2005) vol. 64 (1): 1-38.

"Feminist Tigers and Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies and Instrument Effects in the Struggle for Definition and Control over Development in Nepal." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (2003) vol. 3 (2): 204-249.