Research Program

Scroll ↓

A microscope in the IVF lab.

I was mid-fieldwork when the Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. Shortly after, I published an essay in Somatosphere on the post-Roe politics of in vitro fertilization. Using a materialist framework, I consider how embryologists form affective and intimate relationships with the embryos they culture.

Read it here:

Making Embryos Lively: The politics of embryo personhood when fertilization happens under a microscope

Locked doors that lead to the embryology lab.

Stack of files of embryo cases in need of disposal.

In my dissertation, I trace five stages through which embryos materialize and gain meaning—fertilization, culture (cultivation), transfer, freezing, and discard. I center the perspectives of embryologists who work most closely with human embryos in the lab every day. I argue that embryologists form shifting orientations to embryos as they move through these processes.

3D live image of a mouse embryo presented at 2022 American Society for Reproductive Medicine conference.

My research program connects the embryology lab to a constellation of other spaces that dot the landscape of in/fertility. My ethnographic research has brought me into reproductive endocrinology operating rooms, medical research laboratories, animal research facilities, medical conferences, Catholic cemeteries, and beyond.

Catholic cemetery memorial to miscarried embryos, fetuses, and stillborn infants.

I am currently revising an article in which I theorize embryos as ontologically ‘multiple’ (Mol 2002) and ‘slippery’ (Helmreich 2014) entities—highly politicized things that evade static categorization. Drawing on original ethnographic data, I demonstrate how embryologists enact complex understandings of ‘life’ as they grow and manage embryos every day.

Sperm cells seen swimming on computer monitor.

My next project will explore posthumous reproduction, a vanguard of reproductive technologies. Following the completion of my PhD in spring 2024, I plan to begin research in 2025 with scientists performing uterus transplants from deceased donors for patients with uterine factor infertility; and postmortem gamete extraction, in which sperm is extracted posthumously in the hopes of creating viable embryos.

About Me

Teaching