I received my PhD in History from Harvard in May 2017, and currently serve as American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. I research, write, and teach about the U.S. in the World, focusing on transnational histories of policing and prisons. My dissertation, America’s Carceral Empire: Confinement, Punishment, and Work at Home and Abroad, 1865-1946, traces the imperial roots of the carceral state in the Gulf South, Pacific Northwest, Philippine Islands, and Panama Canal Zone.
I have published and forthcoming work in a variety of venues including the International Review of Social History, Archive Journal, New Orleans Tricentennial Prosperity Index, Prison Photography, American Federation of Teachers Voices on Campus, Academic Exchange Quarterly, Routledge, Journal of the Oxford University History Society, ArcGIS Online, PBS Learning Media, and Medium.com.
At Harvard I served as Teaching Fellow for courses on the History of the U.S. in the World, the African Diaspora in the Americas, and Multimedia Methods. I was an inaugural member of the Presidential Instructional Technology Fellows (PiTF) and Digital History Teaching Fellows (DiTF) programs, and received Harvard's Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching for each semester I taught.
As a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Orleans, I created a new course on Policing and Prisons in Local and Global Perspective and co-directed Lousiana's contribution to the States of Incarceration national public history project. Before returning to graduate school I taught public high school in East Los Angeles, where I was named the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Outstanding Teacher of the Year for the U.S. in 2011.