Research Interests

My research projects center around cultural globalization, identity, material culture/materiality (including objects, place, and the body), language, and changing perceptions of heritage, kinship, and relatedness. I have conducted fieldwork at multiple sites in Portugal, the United States, and throughout the Portuguese diaspora, as well as in online discussion groups.

As a whole, my work is grounded in phenomenological and constructivist approaches to experience and meaning, with particular attention to contingencies and slippages in social categories, interpersonal communication, and identities. Much of my research has dealt with aspects of tourism and travel, whether as a context for studying global interconnection and cross-cultural engagement or a locus for exploring the politics of representation.

I am currently writing my Ph.D. dissertation, described below, as well as developing a related project dealing with museums, material absence, and social memory. I am also engaged in a number of collaborative projects with members of the Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group, also described below.

Ph.D. Dissertation: Global Affinities: Articulations of Marrano Identity and Relatedness in an Interconnected Age. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley My Ph.D. dissertation examines the interplay of global and local forces in the "Marrano" (recovered Jewish ancestry) revival movement in Portugal and throughout the Portuguese diaspora. Based on multisited fieldwork in several countries, including 18 months in Portugal, I explore the role of tourism, the internet, and other forms of international contact in bringing Marranos face-to-face with Jews from around the world and providing them with a global frame of reference that shapes their evolving perceptions of self, kinship, and belonging. Fieldwork for this project was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Maurice Amado Research Fund, and the Portuguese Studies Program, Graduate Division, and Institute for European Studies at UC Berkeley.

With a Portuguese Marrano group en route to meet  with a British rabbinic court, Luton Airport, London, 2006

Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group (www.tourismstudies.org)

I am co-founder of the Berkeley Tourism Studies Working Group (TSWG), an internationally recognized, interdisciplinary research organization housed in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. The TSWG was created in order to provide a much-needed center for critical research on tourism and travel in the United States, one that would bring together anthropologists, cultural geographers, historians, sociologists, linguists, archaeologists, and scholars of literature, cultural studies, and other allied fields.

Current members and affiliates include faculty and graduate students from campuses throughout Northern California, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, UC Davis, Humboldt State, Mills College, CSU-Stanislaus, San Jose State, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Santa Barbara. I served as co-chair of the group in 2003-04, 2006-07, and 2007-08.