I’ve spent the last decade hunting dinosaurs and other extinct animals in the archives. My scholarship focuses on museums, long dead life, and the politics of display. I’m currently at work on my book manuscript…

DINOSTALGIA:

A MONUMENTAL RECKONING WITH MODERN AMERICAN MONSTERS

…a cultural history that traces how dinosaurs were transformed into cultural artifacts, consumer goods, and spokes-creatures for consumption.

WRITING

My peer-reviewed writing—linked below—has appeared in journals that reach cross-disciplinary scholars and museum professionals.

• In “Of Dinosaurs and Intergenerational Culture Wars,” I examine how dinosaurs function as “missionary lizards” for young earth creationism.

• 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.

If you are interested in reading an article but don’t have institutional access, please do write me an email. I’d be delighted to share my author’s copy.

SOME THINGS ABOUT ME

I live in Santa Cruz, California, within earshot of the boardwalk’s rollercoasters. I earned a PhD from MIT's interdisciplinary History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society program. I also completed a BA in Classics at Brown University and an MA in History and Public History at the University of New Orleans. In Fall 2024, I’m teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as a lecturer for College Nine. Previously, from 2019 to 2024, I taught at Stanford University as a lecturer in Thinking Matters (THINK) and Civic, Liberal, and Global Education (COLLEGE).