He graduated from Amherst College with a B.A. in music and political science. After spending a year in Berlin as a Fulbright scholar (1995-1996), he then went on to study Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley. He has been at the University of Michigan since 2003 where he has published and taught on questions of race, sexuality, citizenship, mobility, post-socialism, europeanization, consumption, power, and displacement. His articles appear in Cultural Anthropology and Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, among other venues. Most recently, he has been an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation visiting fellow at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany.