Teaching

My teaching challenges students—undergraduate and graduate, history majors and non-majors—to denaturalize the past using analysis and empathy. I offer introductions to the histories of capitalism and medicine rooted in a broad geography often spanning early America, the Caribbean, Atlantic world, western Europe, and South Asia. I also offer more advanced seminars (often project-based) that build on these introductory courses. In all my classes people, goods, and ideas are constantly in motion. Lectures rely on embodied histories to make big concepts relatable for students. An interdisciplinary approach and projects also help with this goal. Discussions use primary sources and group work to develop an active learning community. My classes foreground themes of freedom, knowledge production, materiality, and political economy, while also providing a chronology of people, places, institutions, and events from both typical and perhaps atypical perspectives.

I strive to foster a positive, inclusive classroom where students and the instructor share responsibility for generating ideas. This requires understanding that students arrive in class with different experiences, skillsets, and goals. Over the course of the semester, I develop vocabularies with students for talking about difficult, yet crucial subjects, such as enslavement, race, class, gender, and inequality. That students learn to evaluate institutions, change over time, and power relationships within racial and gendered, social and cultural contexts is a learning outcome of all my classes. More broadly, I encourage students to not simply absorb a set of facts about the past but to hone ways of thinking, questioning, and understanding that will stick with them moving forward.

Mentorship is another part of my teaching experience. I have experience advising undergraduates on fellowships, graduate school, and job applications. I have also led independent studies and provided guidance to students who have gone on to pursue history MAs and won a Gates Fellowship. Coming from a background in molecular biology in addition to history, I have had success connecting with students from a variety of academic backgrounds to share what the study of history can add to their other pursuits. This has led to enrollments of students with diverse interests and majors. I always look forward to helping graduate students, whether through field preparation or interpreting early modern accounting or medical terminology.

Please feel free to get in touch for syllabi, a conversation about pedagogy, share primary sources and class activities, or anything else related to teaching. Currently, I am integrating more radical assessment into an experiential seminar, titled “Carnal Knowledge,” that I am developing to roll out in Fall 2021. Stay tuned!

Recent Classes

as.100.291

Medicine in an Age of Empires, 1500-1800

When did medicine emerge as a distinctive body of knowledge and a profession? Why did disease come to be understood as an external threat to be cured rather than an internal imbalance to be equilibrated. How did plantations and the armed forces shape expectations of healthcare? The answers lie in the histories of empire and global commerce.

AS.100.384

Intoxicated: Commodities & Globalization in the Early Modern World

Each week we examine a commodity that defined a new era of global connectivity in the centuries after 1492, including money, medicines, slaves, and fashion. The early modern Atlantic world experienced an influx of goods that opened new mental possibilities about nature, expanded acquisitive desires, and ushered in an era of global commerce. Often, coming face-to-face with commodities embodied the clash of empires, ideas, and cultures, whether this was drinking a cup of coffee in London or wearing a calico dress in New England.

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Making Money in the Atlantic World

The history of money is a history of power exercised by states, institutions, and individuals. It is also a history of the structural possibilities and constraints faced by people in the past. We will address making, using, and conceptualizing money in the early modern Atlantic World, a time and a place of expanding empires, extractive enterprises, and changing categories of difference like race, gender, and class. Rarely was a coin just a coin.

Previous Classes

Making Anglo-American Capitalism

From Colony to Empire: America and the World in the Long Eighteenth Century