About

I am an Assistant Professor of Global Politics at Cal Poly Humboldt (Humboldt). Prior to joining the faculty at Humboldt, I was Assistant Professor of Diaspora Studies, Human Rights, and Transnational Migration in the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University, Ohio. I received a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa under the direction of Michael Shapiro. My research and teaching interests span the subdisciplines of political ethnography, critical political theory, Asian cultural studies, mobilities studies, performance studies, and international relations with a particular emphasis on refugee politics in Southeast Asia.

As a Norwegian-American growing up in an immigrant community in Oslo, Norway, I became interested at an early age in how exiled groups form senses of belonging in the diaspora. I later went to live and study in Thailand where I became interested in the plight of Burmese refugees. As a practitioner of dance (I study Ballet/Middle Eastern/Indian/Tai/Thai), one way I engage my research community is through practice and performance.

Interviewing Grandma Yort in the Koung Jor refugee camp, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2017 Photo by Tani Sebro with permission from research collaborator).

My in-progress book manuscript, Aesthetic Nationalism: The Dance of War and Exile along the Thai-Myanmar Border, is based on embedded field research in Northern Thailand, where I conducted ethnographic and archival research with Tai refugees from Myanmar. My work has appeared in Critique of Anthropology, the Review of Human Rights, Political Geography, and in various edited volumes. For a full list of current publications, see my CV.

In 2022 I received a Fulbright ASEAN U.S. Scholar Research Fellowship to conduct research with Tai (Shan) migrants and activists along the Thai-Myanmar Border. I was also awarded the 2022 McCrone Award for Most Promising Scholar at Cal Poly Humboldt. In 2018, I received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study the Politics of East Asian Buddhism at the East-West Center. I was the 2015 Moscotti Fellow for Southeast Asian Studies and my research has received funding from The Fulbright U.S. Scholar ASEAN Program, The École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), and language training from several Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowships, as well as a fellowship from the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program for the Advanced Study of Thai.

I serve as Co-Chair of the Burma Studies Group and I am the co-founder, with Osman Balkan, of the American Political Science Association’s “Political Ethnography Working Group. I am also a member of numerous academic associations, including the Asian Studies Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Dance Studies Association, and the American Political Science Association.