I hold a dual appointment at UC Davis as an Assistant Professor in the departments of American Studies and Design. My forthcoming book, Explosivity: Following What Remains, is anticipated in Spring 2025 from the University of Minnesota Press. I’ll have more info on this site as it becomes available.
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), which is a Davis Humanities Institute-funded working group that brings together graduate students, faculty, and community members to dissect myriad forms of state and proto-state violence.
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 of explosions, and the movement, logistics, and securitization of explosive substances.
My new research lines look into topics such as: the geography of dynamite logistics, the movement of debris from the so-called Spanish American War, and the military occupation of Puerto Rico.
I teach broadly in the fields of political ecologies, natureculutures, critical military studies, landscape studies, and chemicalized geographies.
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.
Ph.D., Geography, University of California, Berkeley CA
S.M.Arch.S., Architecture Studies (Architecture and Urbanism), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA
B.Arch., Cornell University, Ithaca NY