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
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.
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).