I am a PhD candidate in the History Department at Duke University, where I work on the history of medicine in the Spanish Atlantic World. My dissertation, "Brazo-a-Brazo: Humanitarian Medicine and the Preservation of Empire," considers how smallpox vaccination, medical experimentation, and slavery in Mexico and Cuba created a new but fractured culture of medical consent in the nineteenth century. My broader research interests include the history of medicine, science, and technology; slavery and emancipation; empire and colonialism; and feminist and queer studies. I teach on the history of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, the history of science and empire, and gender and women's history. 

​Before graduate school, I worked as a curatorial assistant and archaeologist at the Kingsley Plantation, the home of Zephaniah Kingsley and his wife, Anna Madgigine Jai, a Senegalese woman who was purchased by Kingsley as a slave and freed in 1811. The work I focus on now—tracing ideas and connections across the Spanish Atlantic—​is yet animated by my anthropological training and my curiosity about the outer spaces of empire.

I am a member of the Duke Digital History Working Group and a co-founder of Duke HAW (Historians are Writers), a group committed to thinking deeply about creative writing in the world of academia and beyond.