ABOUT ME
I am a historian, museum researcher, and, currently, a lecturer at Stanford University. Since 2019, I’ve taught liberal education courses through Stanford Introductory Studies on a wide variety of topics including citizenship, design thinking, education, creative writing, extinction, the long history of war, and more. I’ve also taught a specialty seminar called “Animal Archives: History Beyond the Human” through the History Department. I have years of experience collaborating on pedagogy with fellow instructors in universities as well as in museums.
I earned a PhD from MIT's interdisciplinary History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society program in 2019. Prior to my work at MIT, I earned a BA in Classics at Brown University and an MA in History and Public History at the University of New Orleans. Not that long ago, Curbed described me as a "die-hard fan" of SUE the T. rex.
I’ve spent the last decade hunting dinosaurs and other extinct animals in the archives. My writing focuses on museums, extinct creatures, and the politics of display:
In “Out of Time at the La Brea Tar Pits: People and Other Animals in a Time Capsule of Ice Age Los Angeles,” I ask what it means that visitors to the public park encounter extinct animal models exclusively, when extant animals are represented in the pits’ fossil record too.
In “Pleistocene Park, and Other Designs on Deep Time in the Interwar United States,” I compare various historical schemes to approximate prehistoric environments and show how these anachronistic spectacles serve the status quo.
In “A Discourse with Deep Time,” I show how the Victorian-Era Crystal Palace Dinosaurs, still on display in London, were part of a scientific and cultural conversation that transformed pre-human history into national patrimony.