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 production and consumption of food. On the one hand, it is the story of how the industrialization of the food system fostered an idealized white, middle class citizen consumer who was conscientious of quality, curious about culture, and ambivalent if not hostile to labor, environmental, and ethical issues. On the other, it is also the story of how 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 around production and consumption. Narrowing the scope of an otherwise unwieldy set of inquires, the project focuses on Chicago in the 1890s with an eye to 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.