I am joining the History Department as a visiting professor in Latin American history for 2009-2010. I graduated from the University of California, Davis, with a Ph.D. in history in June 2009 and recently completed a Guggenheim Fellowship at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. I took the scenic route to Rhodes College. I worked several years as a sports writer, copy editor, and graphic designer for newspapers in Florida and Kentucky before Latin American literature and history enticed me away from the newsroom.

While living in Peru (2006-2008), I completed a year of master’s course work at the Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. I also conducted dissertation research in mountain, jungle, and coastal cities throughout the country and visited archives in Argentina and Chile. Nothing in my previous life as a reporter rivaled riding a motorcycle in the upper reaches of Cuzco, the former Inca capital located at nearly 11,000 feet in the Andes. Traveling Cuzco’s backroads provided a unique tour inside striking Andean geography – a living historical archive in which centuries of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and republican history were on display.

Teaching Interests
My newspaper experience not only taught me writing, research, and editing skills, it also prepared me to synthesize and communicate challenging topics in a relevant way. I have a master’s degree in Latin American studies from Tulane University and am committed to interdisciplinary teaching and scholarship. As a social and cultural historian, I draw upon literature, anthropology, postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies. Beyond core Latin American history courses, I am teaching two classes in areas I find especially intriguing: Latin American History and Literature (HIS 105) and Truth Commissions in Latin America (HIS 405). Both courses offer unique ways to examine colonial legacies and republican possibility, the challenges of nineteenth-century nation-building, cultural tensions with Europe and the United States, the ongoing narrative of civilization vs. barbarism, and the role of race, gender, class, and politics in contemporary Latin American society.

Research and Publications
In my dissertation, “The Rarefied Air of the Modern: Aviation and Peruvian Participation in World History, 1910-1950,” I theorize the “universal” technology of aviation as a script for world history on the “periphery.” The success of Peruvian pilots in European aviation competitions in 1910 generated great optimism that this new technology could lift the Andean country out of its perceived backwardness. Poor infrastructure and a ghastly number of pilot deaths slowed the project, but in 1928 two companies began transporting passengers and mail from Lima to other parts of the country and continent. I am particularly interested in why modernizers in Peru perceived aviation as an emancipatory agent, a modern tool for crafting a relevant and updated national historical narrative, and a corrective to the missed opportunities and deficiency that many thought tainted the first century of the Peruvian republic.

An article from my dissertation, “Flying ‘Cholo:’ Incas, Airplanes, and the Construction of Andean Modernity in 1920s Cuzco, Peru,” appeared in The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History 63:3 (January 2007). I also joined professors Carlos Aguirre (University of Oregon) and Charles Walker (University of California, Davis) in translating and editing Buscando un Inca (In Search of an Inca), an important Peruvian history book by the late Alberto Flores Galindo. Cambridge University Press is scheduled to publish the text this year. Another article, “El vehículo de la historia universal: El inicio del programa de aviación durante el ‘Oncenio’ de Leguía” (“A Vehicle for World History: The Initiation of Aviation during Leguía’s ‘Oncenio’”), will appear in a forthcoming edited volume by the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos in Lima.