I write about exchange and power in the early modern world, particularly through the lens of medicine and economy. My work pays attention to the interplay between expectations and experiences to examine how material things influenced the ways people understood themselves, their neighbors, and the world around them.

I am currently an Assistant Clinical Professor in the University Honors program at the University of Maryland, College Park where I teach on Information & Power. My work has appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of British Studies, and Washington Post. Before arriving at UMD I taught courses on early America and the British empire, capitalism, medicine, and global connectivity at Johns Hopkins and Stanford Universities after receiving my PhD from Brown University.

My first book, Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2020), addresses medicine’s codependence on plantation agriculture, long-distance trade, financial markets, and colonial warfare. From the late seventeenth century, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial spaces. For some, these products offered the prospect of power and wealth, but for others they were part of the mechanisms of enslavement that prompted reconsiderations of the bodies and remedies that moved across emergent global networks.

Ongoing projects include my second book that considers healthcare for precarious, mobile populations through medicines and money at a broadly comparative scope, as well as articles in progress on the blurry boundaries between early modern medicine manufacturers, counterfeiters, and alchemists across the Atlantic world and the bound labor practices of the eighteenth-century medicine trade.

My writing for a public-facing audience has appeared in the Washington Post and Boston Review. I have also written for a medical audience in the journal CHEST.