Professional Summary
In my research, I unite literary and cultural criticism with Plant Studies and the Blue Humanities to draw out an environmental philosophy that looks towards the alternative flourishings of human and non-human-other entanglements, dialoguing with Black Geographies and Critical Indigenous Studies. With a focus on 19th to 20th century Mexico and the Caribbean, I probe new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between raciality and environmental discourse at the level of the nation-state to address the potential for belonging and alternative reworlding amid environmental transformation of rural spaces. In particular, as I engage subplots within monoculture’s narrative of transformation, destruction, and transition to attend the conceptual and material roles that the vegetal and water have for Afro-descendent and Indigenous peoples.
Currently under review, my monograph titled The Garden State: A Plantation Politics of (Up)Rooting in 19th century Latin America, an extension of my doctoral work for which I was awarded the prestigious Bilsland Fellowship, is the first in a series of book-length projects to redress belonging and race through interspecies entanglements within garden and garden-like sites contiguous to the plantation. Journeying concentrically through the plantation's geography, I look to material and literary garden spaces that uphold and show the failure of agro-racial politics as part of a networked politics of death, labor, desire, and secularization.
I have begun work on my next monograph tentatively titled Mexico's Liquid Modernities, which will address the politics of modernity making through liquid in various viscosities. For this, I am currently undertaking research on the tacit relationship between salinity, stagnation, and Indigenous hydrocommons in the 19th century.
In addition to this, I have undertaken research in intercultural education and experiential, community engaged pedagogies. For more information, please find my C.V. linked here.
Education
Ph.D: Purdue University West Lafayette, IN, 2022 (Hispanic Literature and Culture)
M.A.: Purdue University West Lafayette, IN, 2017 (Hispanic Literature and Culture)
B.A. (hons): Durham University Durham, U.K., 2014 (Modern Foreign Languages (Spanish, German, Arabic))