Assistant Professor
***On sabbatical leave AY 2023-2024***
I am a historian of the United States. I focus particularly on the histories of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the West. My work is situated at the intersection of multiple subfields of history, from race and environment to labor, migration, and colonialism. In other words, I study empire and capitalism in action.
Migrant sugar beet workers are at the heart of my current work. In my manuscript, I follow corporate sugar into southeastern Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century and trace its efforts to hold diverse working communities within a highly unequal and hierarchical land and labor regime for the better part of a century. In doing so, I unearth the long and entangled histories of Indigenous, Mexican, Asian, and white peoples in a space structured by U.S. expansion, Indian removal, and anti-Blackness. My book reveals the fundamental role that occupying, transforming, and controlling the land played in the evolution of the American state and racial capitalism in the post-Civil War period.
Before joining the faculty at Berkeley, I was the Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Ethnicity Studies at the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts from 2017-2020, where I taught courses in History and American Studies. I have received fellowships and awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Organization of American Historians, and the Western History Association. In 2018, my dissertation won the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award from the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association and the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Immigration and Ethnic History Society.
Education
Ph.D., University of Minnesota, U.S. History
M.A., University of California, Berkeley, Latin American Studies
B.A., University of Colorado, Boulder, International Affairs, summa cum laude
Research Interests
- U.S. History
- American West
- Latinx History
- Indigenous History
- Relational Race Studies
- Agricultural and Environmental History
- Migration, Labor, Capitalism
- Transnational History
- U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
- U.S.-Latin American Relations
- Empire and Settler Colonialism
