Scholarship

Recent Teaching

• “Borders and Migration in the British Empire” – Stanford University, Winter 2018-19

• “Three Waves: Women and Resistance, 1848-2018” – Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Sonoma State University, Fall 2018

Freelance Writing/Editing

Currently, I am focusing on independent research that blends family history and memoir with stories of settler colonialism in Ireland, Pennsylvania, and California.

Much of my prose writing blends research, close reading, and personal story. Examples include:

My more strictly academic work includes:

• A review of Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, published in the February 2020 issue of the American Historical Review. 

• Freelance editing. I have worked with the Department of Neurology at Stanford University as well as various nonprofit organizations and private individuals. I was a developmental editor for Shira Robinson’s (no relation) award-winning Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford UP, 2013).

• Research, writing, and content development services for the World History Project, a companion site to the Big History Project. Both sites offer free, online high school curriculum resources, and the World History Project is providing high school world history teachers with innovative, inclusive, accessible content for their classrooms. All of my articles for the World History Project are free and public-facing at Khan Academy.

You can view a video that I scripted and narrated for this project here:

• Tinker, Tailor, Vagrant, Sailor: Colonial Mobility and the British Imperial State, 1880-1910

Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2005

I am currently rethinking my dissertation for publication. I am open to reworking individual pieces, collaborating with an artist on a graphic history (that would be so exciting!), or publishing the entire darn thing.

It examines encounters between colonial sojourners and British imperial bureaucrats both inside Britain and outside the boundaries of the empire, to illuminate the role of travel networks, stories, and ideologies in the formation of modern bureaucratic categories of citizenship. It is filled with characters and stories that are hard to forget — circus performers and impostors and eye doctors and miners and consuls and befuddled Foreign and Colonial Office bureaucrats. It holds intimate stories of migration, mishap, and precarity in the same hand as big stories of global integration and imperial power.

If you’re racked by curiosity and want to find a copy, you can go through WorldCat, Or you could get just a taste of the kind of story I told by reading this blog post from the British Library.

For this project I conducted archival research at the National Archives, the Oriental and India Office Collection of the British Library, and the London Metropolitan Archives in the UK; and the Trinidad and Tobago National Archives, the Barbados Archives, and the Barbados Public Library.

• The Insular Empire: America in the Marianas

I served as Research Director for this public television documentary, which aired on PBS nationwide and is now included in the Zinn Education Project’s list of recommended Teaching Materials.

You can watch a trailer for the film here:

For this project, I conducted photographic and textual archival research at the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands College Archives; CNMI Museum of History and Culture; the Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam; the War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Guam; the Bishop Museum and Archives, Honolulu; and the Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai’i at Manoa.