Faculty by Concentration

US-Mexico Borderlands

Immigration: Mexicans, Asians

Gender and Sexuality

Race and Nationalism

Chinese Communities in Mexico and at the US-Mexico Border

Public History

Human Rights 

Colonial Latin America and Caribbean history

Slavery and Emancipation

Civil War Era

History of Children and Childhood

American South

Indigenous History, Museum Studies, Commemoration and Public Memory, Native American Cultural Production, Public History, and Ho-Chunk Tribal History

Latin America, Panamá, U.S. empire, race, labor, California Gold Rush, socialism, Cold War, transnational/global history/world history.

Historical Memory, Asian American Pacific Islander History, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Gender, 20th Century US History, Pacific War History, Oral History, Redress, and Reparations

Modern Japanese history, cultural and intellectual

Modern China and diasporas; transnational, transregional, and global history

Philippine history, science and technology studies, Southeast Asian studies, history of plant sciences, agrarian migration

Modern South Asia, Urban, Labor, Caste, Dalit Studies, Marxism, and Intellectual History.

I’m an associate professor of history at UCSC interested in the history of science, medicine, empire, and the long-term impacts of technological change. My most recent book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, was published in 2024 and positively reviewed in The New Yorker (here’s their review article), The New York Times, Science, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Wall Street Journal. I was interviewed about the book by Terry Gross for the National Public Radio show Fresh Air.

My first book The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (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.

My doctoral advisor at UT Austin (PhD, 2015) was Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and I was trained as a historian of the early modern Iberian empires and the Atlantic world. I am currently working on two book projects (one a history of the entangled concepts of extinction and apocalyptic technology in the early modern period, the other a family and imperial history of applied science in the period between the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa and the outbreak of World War I).

As of summer, 2024 I am accepting graduate students in the fields of comparative or global early modern history, the history of medicine, drugs, and pharmaceuticals, the history of science, and the history of technology and its social or cultural impacts.

I’m also very interested in the use of AI for experiential learning, and am actively exploring the educational potential of LLM-based historical simulations; you can read about some of this work in progress here.

You can find my CV here.

Modern Jewish history; Hasidism; History of Religions, African American Islam; history of eugenics in the United States; Gnosticism

Modern Jewish History

Modern History of North Africa and the Middle East

Modern European History
French History
Nation-state Development & Nationalism
Immigration & Integration in Europe
Rhetoric and Composition

European history, Jewish history and literature.

Second Temple Judaism, Early Christianity, History of the Ancient Near East, New Religious Movements, Methods and Theories for the Study of Religion