Making the Coast Pacific is an environmental history of violence against places, plants, and people. Mexico's Pacific Coast region was a key site for oilseed agriculture and industrialization, which resulted in environmental violence and injustice. Since the region with Mexico's largest population of afro-descendants, Costa Chica, was also Mexico's leading...
This dissertation examines the role of the Botanic Garden at Buitenzorg, created in 1817, in shaping the practice of colonial agriculture in the Netherlands East Indies. It explores how Buitenzorg and its surrounding highland environs were an ideal place for botanical investigations and agricultural experimentation. The initial task of the...
This dissertation aims to redefine the concept of pain as it appears in literary studies and demonstrate how the new definition garners insight into the interwovenness of literature and physiology in the mid-eighteenth century. It challenges the claim that pain is opposed to language by adopting a new materialist concept...
This dissertation, titled “The Rocket’s Red Glare: Global Power and the Rise of American State Technology, 1940-1960,” makes three distinct but interlocking historical interventions. First, it argues that the rise of technology as a central ideological component of global hegemony represents a historical contingency, rather than a reflexive characteristic of...