I am an advanced doctoral student in history at Yale with a prior doctorate in developmental biology from the University of Chicago.

My research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of environment, science, and labor, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds.

My dissertation, “What is a Reef? Ontology and Ecology in the Indian Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico,” is a comparative project that explores the intellectual histories of “reef” ontologies in Sri Lanka, Belize, and the American Gulf Coast. Each serves as a case study of a region where reefs have received scant or uneven attention, especially since the Great Barrier Reef often dominates public and scholarly discourse and representation, thereby drawing attention that fosters public interest in “conservation” in profoundly unequal ways. Utilizing geospatial mapping, text data mining, and oral histories, I show how specific ways of seeing reefs formed and entangled with the valuation of nature from the late nineteenth century to the present. Colonial and post-colonial scientists, extractivist industries, nation-states, and conservationist companies, among others, not only attached affective qualities to a reef but, in doing so, came to define the reef itself.

Despite seemingly shared goals, different scientific communities often construed reefs in conflicting ways, even as reefs and coasts were regulated through the process of state-making and commodified through capital accumulation across the twentieth century in various ways, thus linking local contexts to global markets. By tracing the conceptual systems underpinning the “reef,” I aim to show how the contemporary moment provides yet newer ways of seeing that have not been sufficiently problematized. By way of ecosystem services, for instance, different reefs have come to be described in monetary amounts. But what does it mean for an ecosystem to have a price tag?

My sources span colonial and postcolonial reports, administrative records and reports by various government departments and ministries, land grants, parliamentary debates, legislation, newspapers, bulletins, and internal findings of research groups and commissions stemming in either the public or private sphere, maps, surveys, findings, and perspectives from fisheries science, engineering, development economics, geology, hydrology, ecosystems management, ecology, and oral histories. My work builds on my MA work at the University of Chicago, for which I focused on a multiscalar history of coral reefs for the Great Barrier Reef in an attempt to narrate a history of reefs at various “scales” of coral, using research findings from oceanography to microbiology and genomics from the late eighteenth century to the present.

I am deeply interested in multidisciplinary, public-facing, and trans-regional methods and pedagogies for studying the past. My broader aim is to examine global environmental thought, capital accumulation, and state-building, particularly in the context of capitalism and decolonization, while also engaging with STS, and comparative literature.

I am a Graduate Writing Fellow at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale and a Franke Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Sciences and Humanities. My work has been generously supported by the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies, the South Asia Studies Council, the Franke Program in Sciences and the Humanities, and the Marine Biological Laboratory.