About

My first book, Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain (University of Alabama Press, 2019), examines taxation in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world from the perspectives of free people of African descent, local officials, and fiscal bureaucrats. Using petitions and lawsuits related to royal tributes, free people of color in what is today Mexico shaped colonial ideas of family, Blackness, subjecthood, and genealogy.

My current research examines the connections between New Spain and the Indian Ocean World. In my second monograph project, I follow the remarkable life of a young, enslaved man of East African ancestry who sued for his freedom in Mexico City in the mid-seventeenth century. I am the lead editor of Everyday Life in the Philippines (1657-1699): Selections from the Manuscripts of Juan de Paz (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), which I co-edited with Drs. Marya Svetlana T. Camacho and Juan Mesquida.

A future comparative project, “Heirs to their Houses: Families in Early North America,” will focus on property ownership and belonging in families that included people of African descent. I am interested in histories of the household and family under colonial rule.

I serve as a University of Houston faculty mentor in the Mellon Research Scholars Program, which supports students pursuing research and careers in the humanities.  Prior to teaching at UH, I was Visiting Assistant Professor in Latin American History at Northern Arizona University and Assistant Professor of World History at Georgian Court University.

I keep a stamp collection and attend concerts. I enjoy sewing and learning about textiles. I am classically trained as a dramatic soprano, violinist, and violist. My favorite poets are Emily Dickinson, Nâzım Hikmet, Pablo Neruda, John Agard, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, and Hafiz.