Overview
Hello fellow traveller,
I am originally from Los Angeles, where I went to high school in Venice, California. I went to West Los Angeles Community College and then studied Spanish at the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca in Spain, eventually graduating in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Just before coming to Duke I taught as a long-term substitute teacher for the Los Angeles Unified School District. I enjoy being outdoors and indoors. When outdoors and in Los Angeles, you will likely find me on the beach. When indoors you will likely find me nerding out on music, speakers, and sound waves. I love North Carolina and making Zines.
In addition to my history department work, I am a teaching fellow for the International Comparative Studies Program at Duke, where students learn about everything between Colonialism and climate change. I am a fellow of Mangroves: Collaboratory for Surging Life, where a diverse group of people think about topics as varied as ancient philosophy and architectural and urban design. I support the activist work of local and national organizations that fight for immigration, labor, and transgender justice.
While my scholarly interests are many, I have training in four fields: modern Mexican and Latin American history, Colonial Latin American history, European intellectual history, and Spanish Civil War studies. I previously studied right-wing politics and fascism in 1930’s Mexico and Spain, which I believe is still a relevant and important area of study. Over the years, however, I have grown an interest in art and literature, the current subject of my dissertation.
I have creative interest in knowledge and consciousness as they are reflected in poetry and novels of the early twentieth century. I ask a suspiciously simple question: how do artists create fictional worlds?; and how do those fictional worlds reflect social and cultural attitudes about the past, present, and future? Especially in art that depicts different people and places, we can learn about the process through which historically-determined perceptions about the “self” and the “other” become solidified. This type of study disrupts our notions of knowledge and consciousness because it shows that we humans conceptualize the existence of something in relation to another thing that gives it meaning.
My intellectual curiosity is inspired by the philosophy of Nagarjuna and Liu An, the latter of which reads:
“That things in their [various] categories are mutually responsive is [something] dark, mysterious, deep, and subtle. Knowledge is not capable of assessing it; argument is not capable of explaining it.” (The Huainanzi, Surveying Obscurities, 2nd Century B.C.E.)
In more ways than one is D.H. Lawrence, the English novelist infamous for his sexually provocative stories, such as Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a most appropriate figure through which to explore these questions. He grew up in the English countryside, only to begin a semi-nomadic lifestyle that took him through Germany, Italy, Ceylon, Australia, Mexico, and the American Southwest, among other places. There he wrote novels that explore the development of the soul, in their pursuit of the meaning of love, individuality, and nature. Through his letters, novels, poems, and more, can we learn about early twentieth century conceptions about women’s liberation, sexual liberation, the value and violence of travel, and cross-cultural conflict.
Please reach out with questions or interests