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Research leading to a book on racial inclusion and racial justice in the early environmental movement.

Green But Not Black or Brown is the first comprehensive history to fully excavate the 1970s origins of the modern environmental movement's persistent and ongoing diversity problems, as well as how and why those failings contributed to the 1980s emergence of the grassroots environmental justice movement led by communities of color.

Research and writing leading to a book about the values that defined Dakar as a major colonial city at the turn of the twentieth century.

Transient Transactions: Making Urban Life in Colonial Dakar, 1902-1944, is a socioeconomic history of Dakar, French West Africa’s capital, during key years of its development. Over four decades, Dakarois developed practices defined not by its colonial designers but by its inhabitants. This book introduces the concept of local transactional culture – norms city dwellers devised to make urban life feasible under colonial rule. The central element of Dakar’s transactional culture was transience, which permeated trade, work, housing, and interaction with the state. This work reveals that economic relationships in Dakar were shaped by people negotiating the city for their own purposes. As the French colonial state strived for control, the local transactional culture adapted. Transient Transactions’ innovative approach to urban African history uses deep analysis of court cases, state reports, and oral histories to offer new theorization of movement and the rich value of justice archives.

Archival research leading to a book on the global history of Spanish medicine, medical professionalization, and medical cures in the early 20th century.

The summer stipend will fund two months of archival research and writing. This project explores the relationships between medical professionals, populist leaders, and popular culture by relating the story of Dr. Fernando Asuero. In 1929, Asuero captivated Spain and Latin America with the claim that he could relieve pain, even cure paralysis, just by touching the trigeminal nerve. As thousands flocked to Asuero for relief, he and his cure became a transnational cultural phenomenon. The populist rulers of Spain, Italy, and Argentina were among Asuero’s admirers, but the medical establishments of those countries reacted harshly, arguing that he was a quack who should be arrested. The resulting book will make important contributions to the medical humanities by documenting how doctors, patients, and politicians were portrayed in transnational popular culture, to the history of the politicization of medicine, and to the history of medical professionalization in Spain and Latin America.

Writing one chapter of a book examining the founding and expanding mission of Quebec’s hôpital-général in the 18th century.

This project focuses on the hôpital-général of Quebec, founded in 1692 as a refuge for the unfortunate poor. Over the course of the French regime in Canada, the mandate of Quebec’s hôpital-général expanded to include all kinds of marginal colonial subjects, from unmarried pregnant women to orphaned children to Huguenot Protestants to the mentally ill, those with contagious diseases, and the physically disabled. I undertake to write a history of this early modern institution, attending particularly to the role of religion in giving shape to the hospital across time and in the conceptual apparatus that enabled and sustained it over the long course of the eighteenth century.

Research and writing leading to a book on religious nostalgia in English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  

My book manuscript examines seventeenth-century English literature’s nostalgic attachment to the early church. The fact that the Reformation had made the early church rhetorically central to its project—but had manifestly not recovered apostolic religion—made the early church a site of fantasy, projection, and longing for latter-day Protestants coping with the imperfections of their own church. Reading the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton alongside sermons, devotional texts, martyrologies, and works of British history, I show the many ways that early modern English culture fostered a sense of identification with the earliest Christians. Nevertheless, Protestants were not contemplating a stable object when they looked at the early church. I argue that as Protestants grappled with the unfinished business of the Reformation, the early church could represent both a lost, idealized past and a lost future. It was therefore a tool for thinking about the Reformation itself.

Writing to complete a manuscript on colonial revival design and American identity in the 1930s and 1940s based on three popular case studies.

This book project examines three popular attractions that thrilled American audiences by seeming to bring the past truly back to life: Colonial Williamsburg, the Thorne Miniature Rooms, and the Index of American Design. These colonial revival designs invited viewers to learn American history through aesthetic experience, not through reading or writing but through seemingly direct contact with the look and feel of history itself. This experience of feeling history produced uncanny effects, in which viewers underwent strange disconnects of time and space, and it helped naturalize ideologies of American exceptionalism and white nationalism. Yet relatively marginalized Americans, including women, recent immigrants, queer people, and people of color, took park in constructing these designs. By interrogating colonial revivalism, this book analyzes how an aesthetic experience of the past became effective at empowering new groups of Americans to take part in the design of American identity.

Research and writing leading to a book on the prehistory of the southern Andes and the Atacama Desert.

“Arid Land Stories. Archaeology of the Atacama Desert” is a book that contains the experience of Aymaras and Atacamenos people through time. It is a prehistory of the South Andes, a region that deserves better knowledge in American archaeology, fulfilling the lack of an English version. It contains results of multidisciplinary research that details the circumstances by which human society adapted to the hyper-arid environment. This development reveals surprising projections when obtaining results that describe complex situations of our ancestor’s ways of life. Arid Land Stories reflects my own philosophy regarding peoples experiences from which one can learn to plan. I believe in the potential of anthropological and archaeological research, due to the essence of the research itself that provides better alternatives and paths for those peoples of today who live in such harsh and extreme conditions.

Research and writing leading to a book that examines how North Africans, particularly Tunisians, negotiated transnational networks and forged new ties at a time when French, Italian, and Ottoman empires solidified national and racial boundaries in the early 20th century.

This project proposes two months of archival research at sites in Paris, France and Bologna, Italy to support the completion of a book manuscript situated at the crossroads of North African, Middle Eastern, and European history during the early twentieth century. “The Mediterranean Overturned” asks how, despite imperial and colonial conflicts that so often acted to solidify national, racial, and other boundaries, did transnational forms of political community in North Africa survive and even thrive? This case study, centered on Tunisia and its neighbors in the central Mediterranean, examines the emergence of transnational movements such as pan-Islam, communism, and Zionism, each of them compelling but overlooked alternatives to the liberal nationalism emphasized by past scholarship on North African history. Visual materials such as those produced by Jewish Tunisian photographer Albert Samama-Chikly help illuminate the intimate and human side of these complex transnational histories.

Completion of a manuscript on the representation of violence in literature, political discourse, and cultural works produced in Haiti and the Dominican Republic between the 1790s and the 1990s.

This project examines representations of violence in literature, political discourse, and cultural productions from Haiti and the Dominican Republic across three centuries. Focusing on material pertaining to various registers and disciplines, it draws on perspectives, aesthetics, and epistemologies from both sides of the island. In doing so, it responds to calls for deploying indigenous tools to interpret Afro-diasporic experiences, offering a homegrown, decolonial, island-centric framework through which to interpret reality across the entire island. As it examines various tropes, figures, and episodes tied to violence, it expands discussions on the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic beyond simplistic binaries, unraveling the complexity born of superimposed French, Spanish, British, and U.S- geopolitical interests, and emphasizing not optimism, as recent scholarship has done, but precisely the contentious as a productive, realistic site for change.

Research and writing an expanded, annotated edition of the collected poems of American author Sylvia Plath (1932 -1963).

A Summer Stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities will support the completion of an expanded, annotated edition of the American poet Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. The Poems of Sylvia Plath, which I am co-editing with Karen V. Kukil, is under contract with Faber and Faber and will be published in 2024. While the Collected Poems includes 224 poems that Plath composed from 1956 to 1963 and a selection of 50 early poems at the end, The Poems of Sylvia Plath will contain all known poems (approximately 514), organized chronologically, and approximately 500 pages of notes. The volume will be faithful to Plath’s final authorial decisions, becoming the new standard for readers, students, and scholars. It will make a lasting contribution to the humanities, one that will provide a fuller and sharper perspective on a major writer and important figure in American culture.

Research and writing leading to a book on Charles III of Spain's Porcelain Room at Aranjuez (1760-65) as a material and visual display of his imperial ambitions.

The Porcelain Room is a tour de force interior that showcases a new method for employing porcelain. Its innovation typified the experimentation that occurred at Charles III’s Aranjuez Palace. Serving as the king’s office where he negotiated policy, the room embodied political messages that formed his imperial agenda and sense of kingship. I frame the room’s implementation of the rococo and chinoiserie as more than whimsical design. Rather, I assert that they are critical modes used to express Charles’ taste and imperial desires. Aranjuez embodied a microcosm of empire in its plantings, wildlife, and in the office’s ornately designed botanical, aviary, and bestiary motifs. By relating the botanical and zoological operations conducted at Aranjuez to the diversity and abundance of natural motifs in the Porcelain Room, both the room and the palace grounds show analogous ways to display the wealth of empire. I situate this interior in the context of eighteenth-century geopolitics.

Archival research leading to a book on the history of how hormonal herbicides were produced, promoted, used,? and eventually came to be understood as threats to human health.

Since their development in the 1940s, auxinic herbicides, the most famous of which is Agent Orange, have been used in agriculture, lawn care, warfare, and invasive species management, with dramatic consequences for ecosystems and public health. This project argues that the proliferation of these “selective herbicides,” which kill dicots but not monocots, explains how agricultural and residential landscapes became what I call “grassscapes.” This book will expand scholarship in environmental history, history of biology, and environmental justice by telling how auxinic herbicides were produced, promoted, and used, and how they came to be understood as threats to human health. My research follows these herbicides from test grounds in Kenya to battlefields in Vietnam, disposal sites in the Pacific, and American backyards.

Research and writing leading to a book on charcoal graffiti and written messages on Pompeii's walls (ca. 79 AD).

This project analyzes the charcoal graffiti that could once be found on the walls of ancient Pompeii. These handwritten messages provide us with valuable insights into life in the first century C.E., especially for groups often excluded from the literary record like women and slaves, but because of their delicate medium, few remain extant today. For this and other reasons, they have been almost totally ignored in scholarship. I will travel to Pompeii to study the precious few graffiti that remain in situ using traditional techniques as well as innovative computational photography methods. Following this research on site, I will produce an article that examines the distribution, types, and visual impact of charcoal graffiti. In addition to enriching our understanding of this long-neglected type of ancient inscription, this project provides insights into the social fabric of ancient Pompeii and the desire to write graffiti – an impetus that continues today.

Research and writing leading to a book on the evolution of news media in Mexico since the 1970s.

My project analyzes how different Mexican organizations and communities have sought to appropriate and control information since the 1970s. During these decades, violent conflicts and the rapid development of communications raised pressing questions about the role that information should play in society: In whose hands was information safe? What did it mean to democratize information and whom did it benefit? Different groups—from Indigenous video-makers to blogging drug-traffickers—sought answers to these questions. Though their motivations were distinct, they shared a common goal of controlling and producing, or achieving sovereignty over, the information relevant to their communities and organizations. Combining ethnographic and historical methodologies, my project reveals how information struggles shaped the political subjectivities and imaginaries of ordinary Mexicans.

Research and writing leading to a book on the history, economics, cultural influence, and scientific impact of orchids in Victorian England.  

My new book (under contract with Harvard University Press) follows the hunt for Cattleya Labiata—aka “The Lost Orchid”—as a means of investigating afresh the rise of consumerism and collection culture in the nineteenth century, the shifting meanings of the orchid in Victorian visual and literary texts, the intersection of Big Science and Big Business, and the power of colonial profit-making. Bringing Darwin into fresh focus, too, my project reminds us that the dark side of scientific progress is too often the exploitation of indigenous cultures and the rape of the natural environment. Plant-hunters took what they wanted from the land: we continue to pay for it, while reproducing their mistakes as we grab without considering the fragility of our ecosystems. The Hunt for the Lost Orchid uncovers a story that thrilled and astonished the Victorians, then, but it’s also a warning to us all as we face down environmental cataclysm. 

Archival research and writing a chapter on children’s rights and the concept of personhood in Europe and the Americas.

In Europe and the Americas, personhood is typically understood as the enjoyment of individual rights, agency, and bodily autonomy. If so, then when did children become people? This book project explores the elaboration, transformation, and application of key concepts underpinning children’s rights as well as the disciplines, practices, and political movements that shaped them but delivered mixed outcomes for children and youth globally. I trace each rights concept back to six national sites (Uruguay; Argentina; Sweden; Italy; Canada; and the USA) from about 1890, and also examine the role of the United Nations and its agencies as influential bodies attending to children’s wellbeing and rights.

Writing one chapter of a study on the role of paradoxical thinking in the treatise On Loving God by medieval theologian and reformer, Bernard of Clairvaux. 

Paradox is a close reading of one of Bernard’s most complex and widely circulated treatises to reveal an influential teaching on love with a web of paradoxes at its center. Chapter 1 is an introduction to the life of Bernard, monastic leader and pivotal player in twelfth-century western Europe. Chapter 2 is a close reading of On Loving God, moving sequentially through its several parts and attending carefully to Bernard’s notion of love as sensation, emotion, and action, in need of careful cultivation. Chapter 3 lays bare paradox as the treatise’s governing theme and intrinsic to its most fundamental claims. Chapter 4 concerns the significance of On Loving God in subsequent Christian theology and intellectual history. This is original scholarship and the first in-depth treatment of an understudied dimension of Bernard’s thought. It contributes to the place of paradox in western European thought and to the history of love. It is geared to scholars and students.

Research and writing leading to a book on the installation of Hindu temple complexes between the fifth and tenth centuries at sites in Southeast Asia whose unusual landscape features had been considered sacred in local native tradition.

In early Southeast Asia, distinctive mountains, natural springs, and rivers revered as the abode of tutelary deities, ancestors, and the heart of subsistence economies, were systematically redesigned as royal temple sites dedicated to Hindu deities beginning in the late fifth century CE. More than just eye-catching landmarks, remarkable features of the landscape were considered manifestations of divine presence called svayambhu (natural; self-existent) deities in Sanskrit language. This study examines the structural remains, Sanskrit inscriptions, and iconographic programs of three monumental temple complexes from Vietnam, Laos, and Java between the fifth and the tenth centuries CE, to show how centuries of accretional building practices produced architectures designed to control powerful places and forcibly transform indigenous sacred geographies into political landscapes dedicated to Hindu deities.

Revisions to four chapters of a book that explores how gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and age shape language use throughout the Appalachian region. 

Appalachian Englishes possess an array of linguistic features that distinguish them from other American Englishes, yet the rich history of language in the United States has created a wealth of linguistic resources though immigration, contact, etc., providing the environment for these varieties to grow and adapt in ways that are also like other varieties. No single monograph exists in the linguistics or popular literature that exemplifies the diversity of Appalachian Englishes in terms of language production, perception, and their entanglement with identity factors. This project seeks to remedy this situation; with a colleague, I am working on a book project (under contract with Routledge) called The Social Life of Appalachian Englishes, which takes a sociocultural approach to exploring specific linguistic features of Appalachian varieties and connecting those to the social life of Appalachian varieties in terms of linguistic perceptions and use.

Research and writing leading to a critical edition of the shorter poems of Thomas Hoccleve written between 1422 and 1426.

This project will produce the first modern critical edition of the first author-curated “collected poems” in the English language, by the medieval English poet Thomas Hoccleve (d. 1426). The poems are preserved in two manuscripts—and, in a truly rare occurrence, both are in Hoccleve’s own hand. Although medieval French authors had produced career-spanning collections of their own poems, no English writer—not even Chaucer—had attempted anything similar until Hoccleve. The collection includes some of the earliest experiments in autobiography, and explorations of gender, subjectivity, heresy, and theological complexity. This project will be the missing piece in creating a complete, up-to-date corpus of Hoccleve’s work, and will make a significant contribution to the fields of English, philosophy, medieval studies, political studies, transnational literature, and theology. The edition is under contract and will be published by Liverpool University Press. 

Writing of a book about the role of honesty for democratic decision-making.

Whenever citizens face a problem or must reach a decision, they ask the fundamental civic question: “What should we do?” Recent events, from attacks on the Capitol to conspiracy theories about COVID-19, demonstrate significant obstacles to civic problem-solving in a post-truth era, where the emotions and beliefs of individuals often trump facts or public reasoning. Honesty and truth are key components of democratic decision-making, but are increasingly under-valued in society and are nearly absent from citizenship education. In this project, I will discuss struggles in democracy posed by deceit and mistrust, clarify how honesty and truth relate to healthy democratic living, and recommend approaches to citizenship education that emphasize honesty in order to improve democracy.

Research and writing leading to a book on how the Cold War has shaped attitudes toward migration, refugees, and national borders in the Asia Pacific, and how this history is reflected in fiction and film. 

While scholars and activists have decried the global rise in ethno-nationalism and the closing of borders to ever-growing numbers of migrants, recent tragic scenes of people attempting to flee Afghanistan—widely interpreted as a “repeat” of Saigon in 1975—remind us of the Cold War origins of many key principles around refuge, borders and humanitarianism. My book project, “Anti-Red: Global Anticommunism and Transpacific Mobilities,” argues that understanding today’s contemporary migration regime requires a deeper engagement with the way the Cold War shaped mobility and refugee policy during the violent upheavals of postwar decolonization, especially in the Asia Pacific. Assembling a body of transnational Asian fiction and film from the 1950s to the present—including works by refugees, exiles, former soldiers and detainees—I show how these narratives map the way the Cold War rerouted the struggles of decolonization into regimes of selective mobility.

Research leading to a book on the history of Chinese laws concerning politically motivated crimes, focused on the Qing (1644-1912) and Republican (1912-1949) periods.

This project examines the legal history of politically-motivated crimes at the intersections between local, national, and colonial authorities in late Qing and Republican China. It shows that political crises in China must be understood within changes in domestic and international law adjudicating crimes, asylum and refugee status, and extradition demands, and sheds new light on China’s ongoing legal disputes and amendments to its existing extradition procedures. It argues that laws and legal norms adjudicating political crimes not only affected the fate of political criminals; they also shaped the rhetoric, strategies, and mobility of revolutionaries and rebels. Conversely, the Chinese revolution had a significant impact on the history of China’s extraterritoriality and the development of the Chinese legal profession and criminal law.

Research and writing leading to a book that examine Urartu's regional networks and the expansion of city states in the ancient Middle East.

While the ancient Near East is known for its empires, the creation of large and enduring states required centuries of trial and error. The thesis of the book is that fortified regional networks were among the innovations that allowed early states to expand their dominion beyond their city walls, and to annex and administer progressively large territories. The book contributes to humanities scholarship by arguing that fortified regional networks were used as imperial tools rather than simply being defensive in nature. The proposal requests funding to complete final revisions and other late-stage writing activities. The manuscript is complete and under advance contract with the University Press of Colorado.

Research and writing leading to a book on Irish female migration to Canada, Australia, and South Africa in the nineteenth-century. 

Assisted Emigrants examines state efforts to remove women from Irish workhouses and relocate them to British colonies in Australia, Canada, and South Africa. At the height of Ireland’s Great Famine, colonial officials advocated for assisted migration projects as a remedy for both the island’s catastrophic situation and the labor shortage plaguing Britain’s other colonies; young women from Ireland’s workhouses accounted for the majority of these emigrants. At the local level, however, commissioners frequently struggled to implement the plans, as some women refused to participate and colonial officials deemed others unfit. By exploring state-assisted female migration within an imperial context, this project highlights both the construction of power relations crucial to imperial control and also the role of Irish women in Britain’s imperial project.