I am a History PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University studying modern United States cultural and social history. I am currently completing a dissertation entitled “Making Modern Fare: Labor, Consumerism, and American Food Culture in the late-19th Century.” The project is a cultural, intellectual, and labor history exploring the 1890s as a period of transition in how people who lived and worked in the United States understood, related to, and participated in the food system. I’m particularly interested in how roles in and relationships to food production and consumption served as proxies for citizenship and national belonging. On the one hand, it is the story of how industrialization fostered an idealized white, middle-class consumer who was conscientious of quality, curious about culture, and ambivalent if not hostile to labor, environmental, and ethical issues. On the other, it recounts the multitude of ways in which farmers who grew, factory workers who processed, retailers who sold, chefs who cooked, and waiters and domestic workers who served food reacted and responded to changing technologies, infrastructures, tastes, and demands. Narrowing the scope of an otherwise unwieldy set of inquires, the project focuses on Chicago between 1886 and 1906, with an emphasis on the 1893 World’s Fair thanks to the huge audience that the event reached and robust body of sources that it spawned.

Also a student of the digital humanities, I am interested in critical, post-colonial, and Black DH applied to textual editing, sustainabile design, and pedagogy. I am Co-Project Manager and Digital Curation Fellow at Keywords for Black Louisiana, a LifexCode project.