I study the political ecology of colonialism. For me, this means examining the interaction of environmental governance, environmental violence, and ecological transformation in colonial contexts. My projects are collaborative and community based.

I am especially invested in:

• Understanding the ecological legacies of colonial governance, including extractivism, property formation, environmental violence, and colonial exclusions. This work is especially concerned with linking historic land management to contemporary social and ecological concerns.

• Foregrounding Indigenous resistance to environmental violence in colonial contexts.

• Critically examining "sustainability" as a concept and as an environmental practice, including by querying how sustainability is defined and enacted in particular contexts.

• Considering the interplay of non-human and human factors in the constitution of ecologies over the long durée.

• The governance of heritage, especially in archaeological or wilderness parks.

I am currently exploring these themes across two active research projects:

Ollantaytambo Terraces Project

The Ollantaytambo Terraces Project (Proyecto de Investigación Arqueológico Andenes de Ollantaytambo) is a collaboration with Peruvian colleagues and Indigenous agrarian cooperatives to investigate the construction and use of agricultural terraces around the town of Ollantaytambo, Peru across the last five centuries. By tracing the use-histories of terrace complexes constructed by the Inka Empire (ca. 1400‑1532), this project explores how Indigenous agriculturalists in the distant and recent past constructed long-term stability in agricultural systems, even as they adapted to changes in climate, shifts in political organization, and plant and animal introductions. The Ollantaytambo Terraces Project research program is multi-scalar. We use data that range from the microscopic scale of individual soil grains or phytholiths to the immense landscape spanning scale of terrace complexes mapped via UAV photography. Our work reveals how long-term trajectories of land use are shaped by ecological factors like erosion and socio political factorship like ownership and dispossession. This project also considers how the designation of Ollantaytambo's terraces as 'heritage' shapes contemporary agriculture. This work continues my long-term collaboration with the Agrarian Cooperative of Simapuqio to restore Inka-era irrigation infrastructures in the Simapuqio Terrace Complex.

Algonquin Park Logging Legacies

The Algonquin Park Logging Legacies project examines legacies of industrial timber extraction from one of Ontario's most storied 'wilderness' spaces, Algonquin Provincial Park. Algonquin Park is a vast expanse of lakes, rivers, and forests a few hours north of Canada's densest urban areas. Although a protected park , Algonquin has a long history of timber exploitation—an extractive industry that continues today. My work in the park combines archival data on the exploitation of specific tracts of forest, spatial data on the distribution of lumbering infrastructures such as roads, timber shanties, mills, and rivers, and information gleaned from the excavated remains of lumber camps to develop a focused eco-social history of 19th and early 20th century lumbering in the park. By tracking the social and ecological processes through which the space of the park was appropriated for lumbering and transformed over time by extraction, the project demonstrates how the park’s ostensibly wild forests have been shaped by centuries of human intervention.

Dissertation Work

My dissertation, Colonial Agrarianism: A Historical Archaeology of Hacienda Land and Labor in Cusco, Peru, (U. Chicago, 2021), traces the intertwined ecological and social transformations that followed from the 1532 Spanish Invasion of the Andes through a case study of the Ollantaytambo region. The project demonstrates how Andean agriculturalists who lived in servitude under subsequent Inka and Spanish Colonial regimes adjusted their subsistence practices in response to regional political transformation. It also foregrounds the ways that Ollantaytambo's colonial ecology was shaped by it's non-human constituents: marauding sheep and pigs, newly-introduced crops like wheat, and sediments that accumulated in the region's canals and reservoirs.

Photogrammetry model of terracing near Ollantaytambo.

Early 20th century sawmill in Algonquin Park.

Ruins of the Hacienda Simapuqio.