I am an interdisciplinary historian specializing in the United States in the World, Carceral Studies, and Digital Media Methods. 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 am at work on my first book, a history of prison expansion and American empire under contract with The New Press.
I have published and forthcoming writing in a variety of venues including International Labor and Working-Class History, International Review of Social History, Archive Journal, American Federation of Teachers Journal, Academic Exchange Quarterly, Journal of the Oxford University History Society, Prison Photography, ArcGIS Online, the Vera Institue of Justice, and Medium.com. My video work includes the Visions of Justice project I directed for the Vera Institute and the Omni Award-winning Calderwood U.S. History Series I created with WGBH Boston for PBS Learning Media.
I teach courses in U.S. History, African American Studies, and the Digital Humanities, incorporating transnational approaches, global perspectives, and multimedia methodologies. I was an inaugural member of Harvard's History Design Studio, the Presidential Instructional Technology Fellows, and Digital History Teaching Fellows programs. I received the Derek Bok Center Certificate of Distinction in Teaching in each semester I taught.
As a Visiting Scholar at the University of New Orleans, I designed a new graduate and undergraduate course on Policing and Prisons in Local and Global Perspective and co-directed Louisiana's contribution to the States of Incarceration national public history project. In my previous life as a public high school teacher in East Los Angeles I was named the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Outstanding Teacher of the Year for the U.S. in 2011.