I am an anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, and educator. I teach at Boston College in the Messina College program for first-generation, high financial need students. I earned a joint PhD in Anthropology and Music from the University of Pennsylvania in 2025. My interdisciplinary research draws on cultural anthropology, linguistic anthropology, ethnomusicology, musicology, and sound studies to examine the relations between acoustic technologies, value, and sensory experience in Italy and the United States. I am passionate about teaching and have designed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses at Penn, Boston University, and Boston College in cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, and popular music studies.

My current book project, Senses of Value: Sound and Circulation in Violin Crafting Communities, is an ethnography of craft livelihoods and craft learning among makers and restorers (also called luthiers) of violins, violas, and cellos for Western art music performance. The book is based on multi-sited fieldwork in New York City (an international center for the violin market), Boston (home to the only full-time violin making school on the East Coast), and Cremona, Italy (a historic and contemporary center for violin making). It explores how luthiers on the U.S. East Coast and in Northern Italy produce instrumental acoustics and economic value through intersensory interaction—for example, learned ways of seeing, speaking, and listening.

My second research project asks what is at stake in “seeing” sound for historical and contemporary users of sound visualization technology. It turns to the history of science to examine the role of the sound spectrograph in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology, as well as in music making and AI speech synthesis.

I am committed to multimodal scholarship. I completed the graduate certificate in Experimental Ethnography at Penn and presented an audio piece about university maker spaces at the 2023 Screening Scholarship and Media Festival. Currently, I am at work on an ethnographic short film that explores the theme of the intersensorial and intermedial in luthiers’ workshops, in collaboration with Dr. Giovanni Cestino (University of Milan).

My work has been recognized by numerous awards and grants. My research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Penn Center for Italian Studies, the Penn Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, and the Penn Center for Experimental Ethnography, among others. In 2025, my paper “Sensing Chronotopes: Curating Authenticity in Cremona” won the Society for the Anthropology of Europe Student Paper Prize. The same year, my paper “Talking about Sound: Conversation as a Tool for Timbre,” was awarded Honorable Mention for the John Gumperz Graduate Student Essay Prize from the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. My paper “Psychoacoustic Labor: Listening and Care in Luthiers’ Work with Musicians,” won both the 2025 Student Paper Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology Sound Studies Section and the 2024 Wong-Tolbert Student Paper Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology Section on the Status of Women. In 2024, my paper “Instruments Before Sound: Visual Techniques in the Violin Making Workshop” was awarded the Hewitt Pantaleoni Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper, Mid-Atlantic Chapter for the Society for Ethnomusicology.   

I earned a B.A. cum laude with distinction in Anthropology from Yale. I am also a classical violinist and always enjoying learning other performance styles.