About

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) in the Department of American Studies and I am the Director of the Public Humanities Minor Program. I was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship in 2022-2023 for Project Neutral Grounds: At the Intersection of People, Street Food, and the Hustle. In 2022 I was the PI on the ACLS Sustaining the Public Humanities grant with our project entitled, Baltimore Field School 2.0: Undoing and Doing Anew in Public Humanities at UMBC. I teach courses in Food Ethnography, What is an American, Approaches to American Studies, Introduction to Public Humanities, and American Food.

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I am originally from Kentucky and went to Centre College for undergrad where I majored in Spanish and History. I spent almost four years in Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer and as a volunteer coordinator. Upon my return to the United States, I worked for a small non-profit in Kentucky supporting H-2A guestworkers, day laborers, and immigrant families. Partnering with the Kentucky Folk Life office, we put on Food Festivals and I often frequented local taquerias to spread word about upcoming events. This work led me to think about the role of foodways for immigrant communities. After almost two years with the non-profit, I moved to New Orleans to begin a master's program in the Department of Urban Planning and Urban Studies at the University of New Orleans.

While in grad school I worked as a volunteer with the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice with a group called the Congress of Day Laborers/Congreso. The Congreso is a member-led community organization that fights for labor, immigration, and civil rights. That work with the folks at the Congreso helped reframe my research and worldview, from an uncomplicated field of inquiry in my master’s thesis that looked at food and identity to understanding the political economy as it relates to migration, labor, food, and transnationalism.

As a PhD candidate, I spent two summers in Honduras conducting fieldwork for my dissertation, staying with families of New Orleans food vendors to get a better grasp on country conditions—violence, corruption, extreme poverty—that forced people to leave. New Orleans’ large Honduran population stems back to the banana trade, particularly United Fruit and Standard Fruit during the early twentieth century. Pairing the ethnographic field work in Honduras with my research in New Orleans provided me with a more holistic analysis of these transnational processes and the longstanding ties between New Orleans and Central America.  Seven Mardi Gras later, I completed my dissertation in February 2017, earning a PhD through the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. In July 2018 I completed a one year postdoctoral fellowship in the Latin American and Latino Studies program at Lehigh University. I started at UMBC in August 2018.