Cultural landscapes. Political ecology. Resource production and governance. Identity.

I study identity and place. My research is at the intersection of cultural and natural resource management. I am especially interested in public spaces where memory and identity are constructed, performed, and contested. 

Playing in the Past: Public History, Outdoor Recreation, and Designing the Future in North Carolina
UNC Chapel Hill Department of Geography, PhD dissertation research, 2021
I examine the historical, physical, and embodied relationships between landscapes of public history and outdoor recreation using archival, spatial, and ethnographic methods. This ongoing research is funded through a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and funding from the Landscape Research Group.

At Stagville State Historic Site in Durham, North Carolina, a local land conservancy's walking trail begins from just behind the cabins where enslaved people lived on the former plantation. Photo credit: Mary Biggs

Stagville State Historic Site. Photo by Mary Biggs

Duke Homestead. Photo by Mary Biggs

Unsettling Authenticity, Queering Landscapes:
​The Role of Nature at Three State Historic Sites in Durham, NC
UNC Chapel Hill Department of Geography, M.A. thesis, April 2020
​My M.A. research draws on scholarship in cultural landscapes, authenticity, and queer theory to explore how an affective politics of memory is re-scaled for individual consumption through embodied encounters with the past. Through interviews, archival research, and participant observation at Durham's three state historic sites, I investigate how site staff manage the outdoor landscapes around preserved buildings and how visitors experience these managed spaces. Through a queer landscape analytic, I seek to unsettle the constructed natural landscapes in which we learn about the past and deepen our understandings of how articulations of the past act in our present today. Read my M.A. thesis here.

'Una herramienta eco-socio-política:' Performing Identity and Subverting the City through Madrid's Urban Farms
Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship Independent Research
In this essay, I examine the current reality of urban agriculture in Madrid, Spain, as well as the
historical contexts in which it exists. Through interviews, original research, and participant observation, I explore the idea of urban agriculture as a tool in the formation of personal and collective identity, response to contemporary crises, and subversive re-organization of imagined and lived city space. I performed all research and interviews in Spanish during my year in Spain as a Fulbright grantee. Read my essay here.

Photo credit: estaesunaplaza.blogspot.com

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 a critical literary analysis of four Latin American plays. Read my undergraduate thesis here (Spanish).
​