Since joining the Wellesley College faculty, I have expanded my research agenda to include the Politics of chocolate. I HAVE conducted fieldwork across Ghana, visiting numerous cacao farms to better understand the relationship between impoverished cacao farmers, the multibillion-dollar chocolate industry, and the roles of government regulators and intermediaries. I have also conducted fieldwork in Colombia and continued this work in summer 2025 with site visits in Belgium—at the invitation of chocolatiers in Antwerp and Bruges—and with Nestlé in Switzerland. I will present the first paper from this project, “The Risky Chocolate Industry,” at the Recent Developments in the Economics of Risk Conference in Stockholm, Sweden, funded by the Center for the Economic Analysis of Risk. I am now working on a monograph on the subject 

Learn More about “Sweet Studies” here.