Research

First and foremost I am a scholar of nineteenth-century America, by which I mean not just the United States. I am interested in how nineteenth-century political economies create and constrain emerging, interdependent nation states in the western hemisphere and the resulting flows of people, products, and culture these abstractions set in motion. My publications reflect this historical orientation, but they also reflect my interest in genealogies of Latinx identification and cultural production. I have published on Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, but also on contemporary Chicanx punk rock. I am committed to excavating the long histories of things, and to revealing across my body of work the enduring, historical presence and significance of Latinx people in this territory we now know as the United States.