Freelance Writing/Editing
Currently, I am laser focused on helping to build the Working Families Party as an alternative political home that can finally help us create a multiracial, working people’s democracy. I write our local newsletter every week, and door knock for our candidates, and help our organizing committee thrive.
But in the background, I am still mulling over independent research that blends family history and memoir with stories of settler colonialism in Ireland, Pennsylvania, and California.
Much of my prose writing blends research, close reading, and personal story. Examples include:
- “On Power and Aporia in the Academy: A Response in Three Parts,” my essay in response to the Avital Ronell debacle at NYU, was first published on August 18, 2018, on my own Medium page, and then republished on the Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s blog, August 25, 2018.
- “The Gossip Project,” in Uncertainty Club, Issue II: More Everything/Having.
- “In Praise of Folly,” in Uncertainty Club, Issue I: Doing It Wrong.
My more strictly academic work includes:
• A review of Kate Evans’s Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg, published in the February 2020 issue of the American Historical Review.
• Freelance editing. I have worked with various nonprofit organizations and private individuals. I was a developmental editor for Shira Robinson’s (no relation) award-winning Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State (Stanford UP, 2013).
• Research, writing, and content development services for the World History Project, a companion site to the Big History Project. Both sites offer free, online high school curriculum resources, and the World History Project is providing high school world history teachers with innovative, inclusive, accessible content for their classrooms. Many of my articles for the World History Project are free and public-facing at Khan Academy, and you can also view them here.
Here is a a video that I scripted and narrated for this project, which I wish was not so relevant:
Teaching
• “Borders and Migration in the British Empire” – Stanford University, Winter 2018-19
• “Three Waves: Women and Resistance, 1848-2018” – Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Sonoma State University, Fall 2018
• I taught a lecture course on modern British imperialism and a seminar on the life of Roger Casement, British consul and Irish revolutionary, while at Stanford. I also TA’d courses in comparative imperialism, material culture and the built environment, and the history of India.
Tinker, Tailor, Vagrant, Sailor: Colonial Mobility and the British Imperial State, 1880-1910
Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2005
Although much time has passed and my life has shifted, I still dream about revising my dissertation for publication. I am open to reworking individual pieces, collaborating with an artist on a graphic history (that would be so exciting!), or publishing the entire darn thing.
It examines encounters between colonial sojourners and British imperial bureaucrats both inside Britain and outside the boundaries of the empire, to illuminate the role of travel networks, stories, and ideologies in the formation of modern bureaucratic categories of citizenship. It is filled with characters and stories that are hard to forget — circus performers and impostors and eye doctors and miners and consuls and befuddled Foreign and Colonial Office bureaucrats. It holds intimate stories of migration, mishap, and precarity in the same hand as big stories of global integration and imperial power.
It is also very relevant at the moment, as the current Trump regime threatens birthright citizenship, and categories of “desirable” and “undesirable” migrants flood rhetoric in politics and the news.
If you’re racked by curiosity and want to find a copy, you can go through WorldCat, Or you could get just a taste of the kind of story I told by reading this blog post from the British Library.
For this project I conducted archival research at the National Archives, the Oriental and India Office Collection of the British Library, and the London Metropolitan Archives in the UK; and the Trinidad and Tobago National Archives, the Barbados Archives, and the Barbados Public Library.
The Insular Empire: America in the Marianas
I served as Research Director for this public television documentary, which aired on PBS nationwide and is now included in the Zinn Education Project’s list of recommended Teaching Materials.
You can watch a trailer for the film here:
For this project, I conducted photographic and textual archival research at the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands College Archives; CNMI Museum of History and Culture; the Micronesian Area Research Center, University of Guam; the War in the Pacific National Historical Park, Guam; the Bishop Museum and Archives, Honolulu; and the Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai’i at Manoa.