History
History
I am a literary scholar specializing in Latin American cultural production at the intersection of environmental history, extractivism, and the cultural politics of mineral resources across the Andean world. I completed my PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where I examined fiction and non-fiction texts from South America concerned with mineral extraction and its human and ecological implications during the twentieth century. Drawing on ecocriticism and new materialisms, I analyze the effects and affects that global mining and financial flows have exerted on human and non-human bodies, and how these forces have been registered and contested in the literature of the period.
My book manuscript, Mineral Narratives: Affects, Multitudes and Accumulation in the Andes (working title), is currently under development with McGill-Queen's University Press.
I am also a public historian with expertise in cultural memory and the politics of representation, commemoration, and contested public space. My theoretical work in this area focuses on expanding the conceptual framework of the "countermonument," examining its iterations and associated commemorative logics as they have developed in response to the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe and its memorial afterlives in Latin America.
This research connects to my current contribution to The Politics of Communication in Canada, an edited collection forthcoming from Kendall Hunt (Winter 2026), under the editorship of Farshid Keramat. My chapter, “Visual Politics, Contested Memory, and the Public Square,” examines the relationship between social movements and physical commemorative markers in the Canadian public sphere.
My two broad interests are concerned with how communities reckon with the material and cultural legacies of violence, extraction, and historical trauma. Both of these research identities engage with the politics of representation in public and literary space and in the aftermath of traumatic changing events asking how memory, affect, and material culture shape collective subjectivities.
I have taught seminars on Latin American economic, political, and environmental history, as well as courses on the history of U.S.–Canada–Latin America relations, slavery in the Americas, and Canadian urban history. I am interest in teaching courses on Hemispheric History, examining the histories of North, Central, and South America as interconnected rather than separate national narratives.
My teaching interests also include the history of social movements in the United States and Canada. I am currently developing a course on comparative Indigenous histories that examines transnational connections among Mexico, the United States, and Canada, with particular attention to colonialism, sovereignty, legal history and cross-border Indigenous experiences.
Hemispheric History, Transatlantic History, Environmental History/Humanities, Social Theory, Critical International Education, Cultural Memory, Latin American Literary Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Hemispheric Indigenous Studies.
Selected, last 10 years
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