About

On the roof of the Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain, in front of one of the largest cathedrals in the world.

Welcome to my website!

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor at Ball State University. I received my PhD in Colonial Latin American History from Penn State University in summer 2019. I have served as a teaching assistant, research assistant, and an editorial assistant for the Hispanic American Historical Review. I briefly worked as a paleographer and translator for PBS’s show, Finding Your Roots.

My research interests are in sixteenth-century Mexico, Nahuatl, human-animal studies, and cultural change. My book manuscript is titled Nahuas and the Columbian Exchange: Animals and Colonialism in Sixteenth-Century New Spain. It challenges the traditional narrative that livestock and other Old World animals served primarily as unwittingly destructive agents of Spanish colonialism. Using a range of Spanish and Nahuatl sources, I show that Nahuas quickly and eagerly adopted introduced species for multiple local and communal reasons. Animals fostered indigenous peoples’ participation in colonialism in myriad–yet often conflicting–ways.

I’ve conducted research in various archives in Mexico, Spain, and the United States with funding or fellowships from Penn State’s History Department, Graduate School, and Center for Global Studies, the Lilly Library, and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. I will visit the John Carter Brown research library with a short-term fellowship in early summer 2021. I’ve presented at conferences like the American Historical Association, Ethnohistory, RMCLAS, the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and the Northeastern Nahuatl Scholars Conference.

When I’m not translating sixteenth-century Nahuatl petitions or lesson planning, you would likely find me doing one of two things: hiking with my dog Sully, a German shepherd and black lab mix, or training on the mats at Central PA Mixed Martial Arts, where I hold a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.