RESEARCH
I am a historical and environmental anthropologist studying how people politicize “impure” environments in the long afterlife of American industry. Much of my work is based in Baltimore, where I follow industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time. I am especially interested in what kinds of environmental futures take form amid these legacies.
In my first book, Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (University of Chicago Press, 2024), I explore the central role of speculation in American life, from the vantage point of late industrial South Baltimore. Written and researched with support from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies, the book draws on over a decade of fieldwork among Baltimore residents, activists, industrialists, and bureaucrats, and archival study covering more than 200 years. It tells the story of a place forged to enable futures elsewhere: from its early life as a quarantine zone under precautionary public-health regimes; through years spent provisioning the military for both real and speculative warfare; and culminating in plans to build the nation's largest trash incinerator there, billed as a “climate solution” and euphemistically called the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project. Early on, I show how efforts by city, state, nation, and corporation to master the future through ever more conjectural modes of governance have produced an ambiguously toxic atmosphere that has shaved years off locals’ lives. Later, I consider how people living with these burdens relate to the future from a present marked by doubt, after long-held expectations fall apart. Much of the ethnography tracks debates over the proposed incinerator, which were themselves debates about what residents could reasonably desire from within the haze kicked up by an aging industrial order. By following people’s efforts to plant their feet at the end of that world—so uncertain that conjecture has become a mode of life—the book seeks insights into the paths we might yet take, in the face of ecological apocalypse.
My newer work, on far-right environmentalism in the Pacific Northwest United States, moves to fresh terrain but stays with these core themes. Specifically, I train my eyes on ecofascist efforts to repair both earth and “race” from the “corruptions” of the modern age, the dark utopic visions that sustain these efforts, and the roots of both in the genocidal environmentalism of the US settler state. This project—tentatively titled After Apocalypse—has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the Cornell Center for Social Sciences, and the President’s Council of Cornell Women. Like Futures after Progress, it combines ethnographic research with robust archival study, contributing to a research program that lies at the intersection of anthropology and US history.
Before joining Cornell, I was a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. Before that, I earned my doctorate in anthropology at George Washington University. And before that, I worked toward a master's degree in education at Johns Hopkins while teaching elementary school in south Baltimore City.