About

I am a PhD Candidate in Human Geography at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where I explore how cultural traditions endure, adapt, and resist within landscapes marked by historical and ongoing disruption. My dissertation, You Want MY Rhythm but NOT My Blues: Cultural Disturbance and Its Echoes in East Port of Spain and Tremé, examines how practices like Mardi Gras Indiansl, second lines, and the steelpan emerge from and respond to deep-rooted legacies of colonialism, displacement, and structural neglect. Grounded in critical geography, including Black Geographies and Performance Geographies, my work theorizes Cultural Disturbance as a framework for understanding how communities innovate and remake space in the wake of rupture.

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, I bring a diasporic and transnational perspective to my scholarship. My academic training is deeply informed by lived experience, negotiating belonging, navigating border regimes, and carrying histories of Caribbean performance, resistance, and joy. I use ethnography, oral history, mapping technologies, and sonic analysis to ask how culture moves through space, and how space remembers.

I have been fortunate to receive the University of Tennessee’s Fellowship for Graduate Excellence, the Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching Award, and the Tennessee–Rwanda Leadership Experience Fellowship. My commitment to public scholarship and community engagement was recognized through both the John Lewis Student Leadership Award and the Creative Discovery Award for curating Caribbean Currents, an exhibit celebrating diasporic placemaking and cultural memory.

Beyond my research, I am passionate about mentoring students, building spaces of belonging for graduate students, and curating platforms that center underrepresented voices.