Education
Ph.D Latin American History , UC Santa Barbara , 2015
M.A History , UC San Diego , 2008
B.A History , Cal State Northridge , 2004
Biography
I am a historian of health, disease, and medicine in Latin America. I study the ways people talk about, define, and frame disease, health, and citizenship, bargaining with state agencies, public health officials, and health personnel to secure their rights. My current book project, Health for the People: State and Citizen in Colombia (contracted with the University of Nebraska Press), analyzes the role that public health and medicine played in shaping the implementation of social policy in this country during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the state’s desire to define peasants, workers, and women as either sanitary citizens worthy of redemption or unsanitary subjects whose lives were expendable, this project examines initiatives aimed at improving population health, increasing life expectancy, reducing maternal and infant mortality, and eradicating or preventing infectious disease. It explores state formation in Colombia through the lens of public health and medicine, tracing the government’s efforts to establish institutions and programs that addressed citizen health and the varying degrees of community responses to these initiatives. Centering local politics in Cali, it shows how actors participated in debates with local policy-makers—sometimes helping to uphold existing social hierarchies along class, racial, and gender differences and in other instances, contesting the state’s narrow definition of health, rights, and sanitary citizenship.
I have a bachelors in history from Cal State Northridge, an M.A in history from UC San Diego and my PhD in Modern Latin America with an emphasis on Science and Technology Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnicity from UC Santa Barbara. Prior to joining CSUCI I was assistant professor of Arts and Humanities at Icesi University in Cali-Colombia. Some recent publications include articles in The Bulletin of Latin American Research, The Latin Americanist, Revista CS, Latino Rebels and "Made by History" at The Washington Post.
Representative Courses Taught
- HIST 300 Historian's Craft
- HIST 301 Topics in World History
- HIST 360 Colonial Latin America
- HIST 361 Modern Latin America
- HIST 330 History of Science
- HIST 362 Revolutions and Social Movements in Latin America
- HIST 363 Health, Disease, and Medicine in Latin America
- HIST 365 Themes in World History (Latin America through Film)
Scholarship
Keywords
History of public health, State formation, identity, citizenship, politics of health