Writing

I write narrative nonfiction for popular and scholarly audiences. Through intimate portraits and micro-histories, my writing explores the migrations of marginalized peoples who, in the face of state-induced violence and dispossession, made homes in some of the most rugged landscapes of the North American West. Read about my book project and essays here.

Book Project

My current book project is titled No Man’s Land: Unsettled Ground in the American West. It considers how the Colorado River created the unstable territorial conditions for the legacies of slavery and conquest to collide in a place called No Man’s Land, and what this story might teach us as an exception to the process of westward expansion through the twentieth century.

Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

Essays, Articles, and Op-Eds

“‘Whenever We Exist on Any Land, We Know it is Our Country’: Cocopa Mobility and the Colorado River in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1887-1936” The Western Historical Quarterly (Spring 2023)

Review of Gregory Smoak, Western Lands, Western Voices: Essays on Public History in the American West (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2021) in The Oregon Historical Quarterly 23, no. 3 (Fall 2022).

Review of Maurice Crandall, These People Have Always Been a Republic: Indigenous Electorates in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1598-1912 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019) in Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (April 2021)

John Williams, Kevin Burke, Michael Crossley, Daniel Grant, and Volker Radeloff. “Land-use and climatic causes of environmental novelty in Wisconsin since 1890.” Ecological Applications vol. 29, no. 7

“With or without a wall, the border isn’t where you think it is.” The Washington Post, February 28, 2021

Fellowships and Grants

My work has been generously supported by a Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, and an Integrative Graduate Education Research Traineeship from the National Science Foundation, among others.