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 am interested in studying how people, including medical doctors, intellectuals, state officials, and community members, discuss, define, and frame disease, health, and citizenship. My current book project, Diagnosing the Countryside: Campesinos and the State in Colombia, 1930-1950 (contracted with the University of Nebraska Press), analyzes the role that public health and medicine played in shaping the implementation of rural social policy in this country during the first half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the state’s desire to define peasants as either sanitary citizens worthy of redemption or unsanitary subjects whose lives were expendable, this project examines initiatives to improve population health, increase life expectancy, reduce maternal and infant mortality, and eradicate or prevent infectious diseases. 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.
I have a bachelor's in history from Cal State Northridge, an M.A. in history from UC San Diego, and my Ph.D. in Modern Latin America with an emphasis on Science and Technology Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnicity from UC Santa Barbara. Before joining CSUCI, I was an assistant professor of Arts and Humanities at Icesi University in Cali-Colombia. Recent publications include articles in The Bulletin of Latin American Research, The Latin Americanist, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe, HisToRelo: Revista de Historia Regional y Local, 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)
- HIST 499 Capstone in History
Scholarship
Keywords
History of public health, State formation, identity, citizenship, politics of health