Research


The Humanities Institute: Grad Profile

I discuss my research on water management in California with The Humanities Institute for this grad profile. Read more.

THI Grad Profile

The Problem of California: Landscapes, Infrastructures, Ecologies

The purpose of this research cluster, funded by The Humanities Institute at UCSC, is to advance scholarly research that approaches California as a complex problem. Research problematizing the state is vital given the outsized role that certain sectors associated with the state have played as engines of experimentation, innovation, and imagination. From Muir Woods to Hollywood, from Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, California has been a path breaker that has helped shape politics and cultural production, both in the United States and across the globe. The rich diversity of the Golden State makes it an especially exciting site for studying the relations between divergent social, economic, cultural, political, and ecological forces. This research cluster will serve as a venue for lively discussion and interrogation of California’s many contradictions, past and present. It is this cluster’s goal to instigate critical discussion and debate around California’s turbulent past, vital present, and uncertain future.

The Problem of California


Groundwater and Governance

During the summer of 2017, I am conducting six weeks of archival research and interviews in three locations in California. Funded by the Social Science Research Council’s Dissertation Proposal Development program, this exploratory research will focus on the governance of groundwater in the southern San Joaquin Valley. What role do irrigation and water storage districts play in the administration of aquifers? How does the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) affect this process? Balancing time between the State Archives at Sacramento, UC Riverside’s Water Resources Collections, and on the ground investigation in Kern County, this research will bring together historical inquiry with the everyday practices of water politics in the southern San Joaquin Valley.

Recharge Basin


The Highway and the City of God

My archival research for summer 2016, funded by a Graduate Summer Research Fellowship provided by The Humanities Institute at UCSC, investigates Lewis Mumford’s prophetic response to the personal automobile, Interstate Highway System, and suburban transformation of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.

Tracing prophecy through his unpublished notes, lectures, projects, and letters will provide the foundation for an in-depth study of Mumford and his answer to the mounting development of cloverleaf interchanges, automobility, and conurbation.

The Highway and the City of God


Cartograffect

is an interactive cartography of the affect in Baruch Spinoza's Ethics.

cartograffect twopartcartograffect