I am an historian of late imperial China, especially the Ming (1368-1644). My research and teaching focus on Chinese social, legal, and book history. I am currently researching the history of legal education, schools, and libraries in imperial China. Education Ph.D., University of Minnesota J.D., University of Minnesota M.A., University of Minnesota B.S-Art., University of …
I am a geographer who works at the intersection of environmental history, political ecology, science and technology studies, and the history of science with a regional focus on Latin America. My first book, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden was published by Yale University Press in 2019 and …
I am a historian of modern China. But I am particularly interested in the ways that natural resources define and often limit state power in Chinese border regions. My book, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in spring 2018, offers a …
I am an environmental historian of the modern United States, specializing in histories of science and capitalism. I am particularly interested in how the production of knowledge about and the manipulation of the nonhuman world have shaped, and have been shaped by, U.S. state formation and capital accumulation. My first book project, tentatively titled Domesticating …
I am a historian of early modern and modern Japan with particular interest in intellectual, religious, and social history. My current work examines the development in the 1890s and early 1900s of the “Way of the Samurai” (bushido) as a seemingly traditional, indigenous code of honor thought to embody the “spirit” of Japan. That is, …
I am a scholar of United States history and Native American and Indigenous Studies, with a particular research focus on Native schooling. I teach courses in American Indian History, Native education, and environmental history. My first book, Instrumental Indians: John Dewey and Indigenous Schools (UPenn Press, 2026) is an intellectual history of America’s most prominent …
I am a historian of technology with a focus on twentieth-century North Africa and the Middle East. My work examines the links between colonial modernization projects, the construction of racialized technical hierarchies, local forms of political contestation and technological labor, and the remaking of urban environments in the region. My research has been funded through …