I am a Lecturer in Social Anthropology of the Environment in the Department of Anthropology at UCL.

My research interests include the ethnography of Amazonia / lowland South America, human-environmental relationships, indigenous knowledge and rights, gardening and fermentation technologies, shamanism and animist cosmologies, and the politics of conservation and sustainable development. Theoretically, my work is situated between social and environmental anthropology, and engages with ethnobotany, ethno-ornithology, multispecies ethnography, and posthumanist approaches to anthropology. I am particularly interested in advancing a dedicated Anthropology of Plants / Phytoethnography.

I completed my doctorate (DPhil) in Anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2015, focusing on indigenous ecological knowledge and practices in the savannahs and rainforests of northern Amazonia. My doctoral thesis, a product of eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork with the Makushi people of southern Guyana, concerned people-plant relationships in the indigenous lifeworld and cosmology – largely in the domains of gardening, cooking and fermentation, traditional medicine, and shamanism. The study was framed by an appraisal of the impact of conservation and ecotourism on Makushi lifeways.

I am co-editor of TEA: The Ethnobotanical Assembly -- an open-access online magazine about people-plant relationships.

Keywords: Environmental Anthropology; Multispecies Ethnography; Ethnobotany; Ethnoecology; Indigenous Knowledge; Agriculture; Shamanism; Animism; Anthropocene; Latin America; Amazonia; Caribbean.