I am an assistant professor of International Development Studies with a disciplinary background in political and environmental anthropology. My research interests lie at the intersection of resource extraction, state-making, ecology, and infrastructure. In 2021, I completed my PhD (cum laude) in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with a dissertation that focused on the sociopolitical life of small-scale gold mining in Colombia. The dissertation won the J.C. Ruigrok Award of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities and the FSW Dissertation Prize of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

After my PhD, I worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of New Brunswick, doing research on everyday material practices in Colombian mining regions (NWO-Rubicon grant, 2022-24). My current research project explores the everyday performance of transparency in gold supply chains in and beyond Colombia (NWO-Veni grant, 2024-28).

I am the author of the book Underground Politics: Gold Mining and State-Making in Colombia (University of Pennsylvania Press). Since early 2024, I am co-editor for the anthropology journal Etnofoor.