Ph.D. Student
North America
Julia is a third-year Ph.D. student broadly interested in early North American history. She specializes in early histories of California and the North American West and gravitates to historical topics dealing with space, labor, colonialism, and the environment. In 2013, she earned a B.A. in Environmental Studies from Mount Holyoke College before studying history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she completed her M.A. in 2017. At Berkeley, she is laying plans for a dissertation about Native space in Spanish-occupied California. Her current research looks at the variety of ways Indigenous nations of California engaged the Spanish colonial cattle economy in order to set the terms of their relationships with colonizers. She is a Berkeley Fellow and a two-time Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellow.
Julia is involved in several initiatives to support K-12 educators interested in incorporating recent scholarship in their California history curricula. She is currently collaborating with the UC Berkeley History-Social Science Project to host a K-12 teachers' institute on histories of slavery in California, to be held in June 2022. She also spearheaded H-Net's Teach California project, an initiative to make university-developed teaching resources accessible to educators in K-12 and community college spaces.
Research Interests
North American West
Colonial Mexico
Borderlands
Native American history
Environmental history
Geography
Economic history
Fellowships & Awards
2022 Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies
2021 Tinker Field Research Grant, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies
2021 Foreign Language & Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship, UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies
2020 Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study
Education
M.A., History, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2017
B.A., summa cum laude in Environmental Studies, Mount Holyoke College, 2013
