I obtained my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and am currently a Marie Curie Fellow (7th European Community Framework Programme) and Post-doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Leuven (Belgium). In addition, I am a Visiting Research Associate at the Centre for Tourism and Cultural Change, Leeds Metropolitan University (UK).
My research interests include anthropologies of mobility and travel, the local-to-global nexus, discourses and imaginaries of Otherness, cultural brokering, and public interest ethnographies. I have published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and newspaper articles on these topics in the USA, the UK, India, Indonesia, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Colombia.
I am currently writing a book on the anthropology of tour guiding and researching the complex (dis)connections between tourism imaginaries and ideas of transcultural migration (with ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia, Tanzania, Chile, and Belgium). I am on the editorial boards of Annals of Tourism Research, AIBR - Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, International Journal of Tourism Anthropology, and Mondes du Tourisme. I am also on UNESCO’s and UNWTO’s roster of consultants and an expert panel member of the National Geographic Society’s Center for Sustainable Destinations.