PhD, History, University of Chicago;
MA, History, University of Chicago;
BA, Arts and Ideas in the Humanities, Residential College, University of Michigan

I am particularly interested in the social meanings of historically situated human action.  My historical practice is based on empirical archival research, but is also theoretically informed and broadly comparative, drawing connections between several fields that interest me: Latin American history, especially Mexico; the history of medicine; and the history of modern Europe.  I have been inspired by many scholars, including Eric Hobsbawm, Friedrich Katz, François-Xavier Guerra, and Charles Rosenberg.  I aim to teach habits of thought and expression that will benefit my students in the future, regardless of the careers they choose.  I believe that the study of history holds a special place in liberal education, enriching students’ understanding of our world, pushing them to ask critical questions about society, and providing them with research skills to begin to answer those questions.  In this sense my goals as a teacher are directly tied to the way that I approach my own research.

• History of the Political Imagination in Latin America
• The Spanish Conquest: Mexico and Peru
• Epidemics and the History of Disease
• Modern European Revolutions, 1789-1914

• “Pan American Medical Encounters: Mexican, American, and Canadian Physicians in the American Public Health Association, 1887-1892” (American Historical Association, 2006).

The history of public health in modern Mexico was the subject of my dissertation, “From Sanitary Police to Sanitary Dictatorship: Mexico’s Nineteenth-Century Public Health Movement” (2005). I am currently revising the dissertation for publication. In addition, I am in the beginning phase of a new but related project. That project will study the French army doctors who came to Mexico when France invaded that country in the 1860s, and their attempts to treat and understand yellow fever.

• American Historical Association
• Conference on Latin American History

• Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant, 2004.