Cultural landscapes. Political ecology. Memory. U.S. South.
I study identity and place. My graduate work is at the intersection of cultural and natural resource management. I am especially interested in sites where public memory is constructed, contested, and experienced.
Current Research
Historicizing Nature, Naturalizing History UNC Chapel Hill Department of Geography, M.A. thesis, April 2020
My M.A. research examines the political ecologies of 3 state historic sites near Durham, North Carolina, and explores questions of authenticity, memory, and performance through historicized landscapes. Working through landscape situates these historical spaces in present day political, economic, and cultural networks. Through interviews, archival research, and participant observation, I explore how an affective politics of memory is re-scaled for individual consumption through embodied encounters with the past.
Past Research
'Una herramienta eco-socio-política:' Performing Identity and Subverting the City through Madrid's Urban Farms Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Independent Research
During my Fulbright year in Spain, I examined current realities and historical contexts of urban agriculture in Madrid through interviews, participant observation, and archival research. In the cumulative essay, I investigate urban agriculture as tool, response, and subversive reorganization tactic within city space. Read my essay here.
La muerte fecunda del indígena: Las ventriloquias del teatro latinoamericano del siglo XIX / The Fertile Death of the Indigenous: Ventriloquisms of 19th-Century Latin American Theater Bryn Mawr College Department of Spanish Undergraduate honors thesis, May 2015
For the cumulation of my Spanish major at Bryn Mawr College (summa cum laude), I explored how post-independence Latin American nations pushed indigenous communities into a mythicized national past and transformed contemporary audiences into new national citizens through literary analysis of four Latin American plays. Read my undergraduate thesis here (Spanish).