I'm a historian and higher-education administrator based in Jersey City, New Jersey.

I hold a Ph.D. in History from Duke University, where I studied Latin American and Caribbean history, with a particular focus on race, popular culture, and everyday life in Pernambuco, Brazil. My doctoral research took me into archives, collections, and oral histories in Recife and elsewhere in the state, where I examined how race, power, and authority were negotiated through popular cultural practices. I became particularly interested in what humor, performance, ritual, and popular entertainment could reveal about people and communities that left relatively little written record.

My career has since shifted from historical research into higher education administration. I currently work at New York University, where I support an interdisciplinary academic center and the programs, faculty, students, and public programming around it. My work sits somewhere between the intellectual and the operational. I’m interested in how academic ideas become programs, how institutions make those programs possible, and how people experience them.

Before NYU, I worked at Villanova University supporting graduate research and fellowship programs. That work brought me into advising, institutional service, and national fellowship selection, and broadened my interest in the structures that help students and scholars pursue ambitious work.

I spent years in school studying the past. These days, I seem to have found another way to remain a student: underwater.

I was certified in Recife, Pernambuco, in 2018 and returned to diving several years later. I now spend much of my free time learning about freshwater, cold-water, and drysuit diving in the Northeast. What began as something I returned to for fun has gradually become another kind of study—one involving equipment, environments, technique, and an entirely different set of things to pay attention to.

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