Research

I am a historian who explores how rural people understood, encountered, and shaped the world beyond their horizons and the landscapes beneath their feet. While mostly focused on Latin America, I am invested in tracing ties that stretched across oceans, in looking at how even a worn-down cabin at the end of a dirt trail became part of a globalized world.

My 2019 book, From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico, uses the development of southern Mexico's coffee economy to explain how engagement with global markets was shaped by resilient local political and social structures. The project also engages the history of global migrations and provides a picture of localized international commerce in the hands of Mexican and foreign planters, merchants, and politicians. It was published by Stanford University Press. It has been reviewed in the The Americas, Business History Review, Labor, Agricultural History, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Environmental History, Historia Agraria de América Latina, H-Latam, and H-Environment.

My new book project, tentatively titled Projecting Prosperity: Striving for a State in Nineteenth Century Mexico, is a history of Mexico’s national administrative formation from independence through the Mexican Revolution. In it, I illuminate how those who worked beyond the realm of electoral politics understood and imagined the state and to what ends. The project looks past the political tumult that generally defines our understanding of nineteenth century Mexico to present a story of desired and increasingly real institutional stability.

I am also working on a longer term project called From Enlightenment to Development: The Idea of Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Latin America that examines ideas of development, or fomento, in Latin America’s post-Independence era. Instead of asking how Latin America fell behind, the project seeks to understand how Latin American politicians, intellectuals, and producers thought about getting ahead.

Current Book Project →

Publications →

Teaching

I teach courses related to Latin America, Mexico, commodities and the history of capitalism, migration, and development. 

Education &
Past Postitions

I received my Ph.D. with distinction in Latin American History from the University of Chicago in 2014. I have held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Notre Dame Institute for Advance Study, the Harvard Academy for International & Area Studies, the Harvard-Newcomen Fellowship in Business History at the Harvard Business School, and the UC San Diego Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.