I’m a Puerto Rican scholar and an Associate Professor with a dual appointment in the departments of American Studies and Design at UC Davis. I serve as the American Studies faculty undergraduate advisor. My first book, Explosivity: Following What Remains (2025) was published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Previously, I was a UC Davis Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in American Studies, a UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Residential Research Fellow on Civil Wars, and a Ford Foundation Fellow (Dissertation Year Award) at UC Berkeley. See also my ORCID profile page.
At Davis, I’m affiliated with graduate programs in Cultural Studies, Geography, and Community Development. I also serve as an affiliate of the PhD designated emphases (DEs) in Critical Empire and Militarism Studies, and Environmental Humanities. In addition, I help co-direct Critical Military, Security, and Policing Studies (
CRTMIL), a Davis Humanities Institute-funded working group that brings together graduate students, faculty, and community members to dissect myriad forms of violence and securitization.
I’m an experimental geographer with a background in architecture, art, and design. Right now, I focus on the emerging field of explosivity studies (how, when, and where things do, or do not, blow up—and why). I study the spatial politics of landscapes shaped by explosions—or the latent potential thereof—and the racial conditions of explosions. In short, my work has looked at the movement, logistics, and securitization of explosive substances (…and ideas).
My new research dives into topics such as: explosive atmospheres, the historical geography of dynamite logistics, the mobility of remains and memory from the so-called Spanish American War, and the theorization of coloniality across the Pacific and Caribbean worlds.
Teaching
I teach broadly in the fields of political ecologies, naturecultures, critical military studies, landscape studies, and chemicalized geographies. I’ve taught previously at Cornell University, California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, and the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture. My courses at UC Davis cover design ethnographies and geography, nature and culture, cultural studies practices (graduate seminar), and specialized methods and research for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
Advising – updated as time permits
I advise grad students in several disciplines. As an interdisciplinary humanities scholar, I can work with students in research and practice-based disciplines. I’ve taught graduate methods in cultural studies, served on several master’s and doctoral committees in geography, cultural studies, and community development, and supervised MFA theses in design.
Current and past PhD advisees as major professor or co-major professor
Reema Cherian
Dan Paz
Tobias Smith
Luis Hernández Galván
PhD dissertation committee member
Andrea Miller
Diana Pardo Pedraza
MFA supervision
Kaylani McCard
Daniel Tran
Practice
I’m a co-founder of
demilit with Bryan Finoki and Nick Sowers, a landscape arts collective with works exhibited and published in numerous venues. Some of my favorites are:
a piece about “suspicious packages” for the
Harvard Design Magazine; a call to roving criticism for Archis’
Volume; and last but not least,
a design fiction about green militarized automation for a defunct Emirati art publication,
The State.
Education:
Ph.D., Geography, University of California, Berkeley CA
• Oral history summer institute, Bancroft Library
S.M.Arch.S., Architecture Studies (Architecture and Urbanism), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA
B.Arch., Cornell University, Ithaca NY