I hold a dual appointment at UC Davis as assistant professor in the departments of American Studies and Design, and I’m the American Studies faculty undergraduate advisor. My first book, Explosivity: Following What Remains, arrives in April 2025 from 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. In addition, I 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. I focus on the emerging field of explosivity studies (how, when, and where things do, or do not, blow up). I study the spatial politics of landscapes shaped by explosions—or the latent potential thereof—and the racial politics of explosions. In short, my work has looked at the movement, logistics, and securitization of explosive substances.
My new research looks into topics such as: industrial dust explosions, the historical geography of dynamite logistics, the movement of remains and memory from the so-called Spanish American War, and the theorization of coloniality across the Pacific and Caribbean. Currently, I’m participating in, and learning from, the
“Reparative Memories: Communities in Crisis and Archival Care” working group.
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 (graduate seminar), and specialized methods and research for advanced undergraduate and graduate students.
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