Currently, I am an advanced doctoral student in history at Yale, building on my MA work on coral reefs using environmental history, intellectual history, global history, literary theory, STS, and history of science. For my MA work, I focused on the histories of coral reefs using many different kinds of coral research for a holistic historical understanding of the problem facing reefs today using work across scientific disciplines in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am currently a Fellow in the Franke Program in Science & the Humanities, and a Graduate Writing Fellow at the Poorvu Center's Graduate Writing Lab.

My dissertation focuses on the intellectual histories of “reef” ontologies in peripheral reef regions, specifically Sri Lanka, Belize, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Philippines, in the hope of narrating a history of coral reefs that is less Eurocentric and one that connects under-investigated local contexts with the global. My work attempts to understand how various ways of seeing reefs formed, and entangled with the valuation of nature over the 20th century to the present. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, different marine sciences, even departments within the same governments, the very idea of “coral” or a “reef” often varied widely; oftentimes, a “reef” was seen as something else entirely. Using archival collections, geospatial mapping, and oral histories in various countries, I investigate how historical actors like colonial and post-colonial scientists, extractivist industries, nation-states, fisheries officials, and conservationist companies, among others, not only attached affective qualities to a reef but in doing so came to define the reef itself. 

Further, my work grapples with how different scientific communities construed reefs often at odds with one another despite seemingly shared goals, how reefs and coastal resources were commodified and brought into capital accumulation across the 20th century in various ways, how capitalism connected the local to the global, and how the contemporary moment provides yet newer ways of seeing that have not been sufficiently problematized.

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.