I am currently an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. My research centers meaning-making and power dynamics in international organizations. I am particularly interested in how international development and foreign aid are encountered in people’s everyday lives, and the meanings, divisions, and struggles that arise from such encounters.
I am a former Fulbright Scholar, Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellow, and I’ve received grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the America-Japan Society, and the Center for Khmer Studies. I recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.
My work is published in Social Problems, Gender & Society, Socio-Economic Review, Sociology of Development, Gender, Work, & Organization, and Contexts. My first peer reviewed journal article, “Activist, Entrepreneur, or Caretaker?: Negotiating Varieties of Women in Development” won the ASA Section on Sex & Gender’s Sally Hacker Best Graduate Student Paper Award in 2019. My most recent article, “The Logic of Patronage: Relational Work in Cambodian International Nongovernmental Organizations” won the ASA’s Granovetter Award for Best Article in Economic Sociology in 2025.
My forthcoming book, Reimagining Aid: Foreign Donors, Women’s Health, and New Paths for Development in Cambodia, will be released by Stanford University Press in January of 2026.
“Reimagining Aid is a groundbreaking and deeply insightful ethnography that reframes how we understand the global development apparatus. Through richly textured fieldwork, Mary-Collier Wilks exposes the tensions between Western and East Asian donor regimes and the ways in which Cambodian practitioners navigate and rework these competing imaginaries. Essential reading for anyone interested in global health, feminist development, and the shifting geopolitics of aid.”
—Kimberly Kay Hoang, University of Chicago
“At a time of Asian ascendance and American retreat from foreign aid, Reimagining Aid centers attention on the power of Asian and Western imaginaries in the development field. A must-read for anyone concerned with how development happens, resistance to hegemony in the Global South, and the ways narratives of progress are intimately bound up with ideas about family, gender, and motherhood. A real tour de force!”
—Joseph Harris, Boston University
“This brilliant, beautifully intimate ethnography challenges the image of post-war Western aid hegemony, illustrating the new regionalized global society in which we live. As Cambodian aid workers navigate between Japanese and U.S. aid agencies and between competing ‘regional development imaginaries,’ they resist what they see as culturally alien, while creatively reconstructing models of aid, and of gender, for their own societies.”
—Ann Swidler, University of California, Berkeley