I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose research concerns empire, race, gender, sexuality, intimacy, capitalism, and the environment in the hemispheric Americas.
I am a Lecturer in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies at Tufts University, where I teach courses in American Studies and Caribbean Studies that span from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries.
I hold a PhD in American Studies with a secondary field in Latinx Studies from Harvard University. My graduate training was in history, literary studies, and ethnic studies. Before graduate school, I worked with urban agriculture and community-supported agriculture in the U.S. and India. These experiences led me to pursue a MA in Anthropology of Food at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. I published my MA thesis in the Graduate Journal of Food Studies, which I subsequently directed as Editor-in-Chief. I continue to read, teach, and work across a wide range of fields because my interests and questions demand a plurality of approaches.
I am writing a book that traces histories of Asian arrival to the Caribbean during the years before and after the abolition of African chattel slavery. I show that people of Asian and African descent have long formed alliances and managed ecological risk, in spite of colonial attempts at racial management, labor discipline, and extractivism. My dissertation received Honorable Mention from the Caribbean Studies Association for the Best Dissertation written over two years. During the 2020–2021 academic year, I was a Visiting Student in World History at Cambridge University.
I recently published an essay, “‘The Greatest Attributes of Freedom’: Water, Kinship, and the Village Movement in Colonial Guyana,” in the Journal of Caribbean History. I also have a new article, “Imperatives, Impossibilities, and Intimacies in the Imperial Archive: Chinese Men and Women of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Trinidad,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction. My work on breath and revolution will form part of The Cambridge Companion to Romanticism and Race, to be published in 2024. I have authored reflection and reviews in the pages of Environmental History, Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, and the Journal of Early American History.
I have received many fellowships, including from the American Antiquarian Society, John Carter Brown Library, Wisconsin Historical Society, as well as various competitive grants at Harvard, such as those offered by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Asia Center, Knox Memorial Traveling Fellowship, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, among others.
From 2021-2022, I was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University. From 2022-2023, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University as well as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of London.
My teaching centers on interpreting the past with concern for equity in present. I am a lifelong student of Spanish and French as well as, over the last decade, Hindi and Mandarin. I believe in learning through community, regardless of location.