Faculty by Research Specialization

Summary of Expertise

I am an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz interested in the history of globalization, science, drugs, and the long-term impacts of technological change. My book The Age of Intoxication (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) explores how drug users and sellers in the British and Portuguese empires helped to shape imperialism, global trade, and scientific practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It won the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine and is available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats. 

Trained as a historian of the early modern era, I am currently working on two book projects (one a cultural and intellectual history of experimental drug researchers during the Cold War, another on the entanglements between colonialism, climate change, and the concept of magic between 1600 and 1900).

I am currently accepting graduate students who would like to work in the fields of early modern colonial history, the history of drugs, the history of technology, or the history of medicine.  

Research Interests

Early modern world history; history of science, medicine, and technology; Spanish and Portuguese empires; history of drugs and poisons; history of globalization; history and anthropology of magic in a cross-cultural context.

Biography, Education and Training

Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, May 2015.

Honors, Awards and Grants

2020-21 National Endowment for the Humanities Award for book in progress: The Future that Never Arrived: Experimental Drugs, Cold War Science, and the First Psychedelic Era, 1930-1980

Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia University 2015-2016

Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography, 2014-16

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2014-15

Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2013-14

Fulbright fellowship to Portugal, 2011-2012

Selected Publications

Books:

Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central/Hachette Book Group, 2024).

The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019; paperback, 2021). Winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine. 

Journal articles and book chapters (all available as PDFs below):

"The Failed Globalization of Psychedelic Drugs in the Early Modern World," The Historical Journal, Volume 65 (February 2022), 12-29.

“The Flip Side of the Pharmacopoeia: Poisons in the Atlantic World,” in Matthew Crawford and Joseph Gabriel, eds., Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).

“Semedo’s Sixteen Secrets: Tracing Pharmacological Networks in the Portuguese Tropics,” in Paula Findlen, ed. Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018).

“Empires on Drugs: Materia Medica and the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance,” in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, ed. Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).

“Drugs and Early Modernity,” History Compass, Vol. 15, No. 4 (April, 2017). 

“No Man Is an Island: Early Modern Globalization, Knowledge Networks, and George Psalmanazar’s Formosa,” The Journal of Early Modern History, 17/4 (August, 2013), 391-417.

“Hybrid Atlantics: Future Directions for the History of the Atlantic World,” History Compass, 18/8 (August, 2013), 597-609.

"'The Elks Are Our Horses’: Animals and Domestication in the New French Borderlands,” Journal of Early American History, No. 3 (December, 2013), 188-205  

“Portugal, Early Modern Globalization and the Origins of the Global Drug Trade,” Perspectives on Europe, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Spring 2012), 84-88.

Selected popular writing:

"Our Strange Addiction," Lapham's Quarterly, March 15, 2021. 

"'Theire Soe Admirable Herbe': How the English Found Cannabis," Public Domain Review, February 19, 2020.  

“Palm Trees and Potions: On Portuguese Pharmacy Signs,” The Recipes Project, July, 2016.

"Into the Mystic," Aeon Magazine, 2015.

“Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia,” in The Public Domain Review, 2014.

"The King of the Islands of Refreshment" in The Appendix, 2014.

"The Literature of Laughing Gas," in The Paris Review, 2014.

"The Pre-Modern History of Outer Space," in The Atlantic, 2013.

Teaching Interests

- Early modern science, medicine, and technology
- History of the Iberian peninsula and of the Spanish and Portuguese empires
- History of drugs and poisons
- Travel writing of the 17th and 18th centuries
- History of magic