She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held Research Fellowships in Anthropology at the Universities of São Paulo and Toronto. With over fifteen years of wide-ranging research on Latin America, especially on Brazil and Mexico, she is now collaborating with faculty at the University of Toronto's Latin American Studies Centre to renew understandings of Christianity's role in Latin American cultures and histories. Her recent ethnographic research has focused on the interplays of Christianity and politics with the Landless Worker's Movement and former goldminers in Amazonia, subjects that have also inspired Sebastião Salgado's previous photographic work.