• PhD, University of California, Berkley, 2008
• MA, University of California, Berkley, 2003
• BA, University of British Columbia, 2000

I am Associate Professor of Latin American History with a specialization in the urban and cultural history of political change in Cold War Latin America. My first book, Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile (The University of California Press, 2016), is a study of the myriad ways in which traditionally marginalized individuals claimed city spaces as a political act. It suggests that protests, marches, strikes, public art, street photography and documentary film were part of a broader attempt to challenge the limits of citizenship and the public sphere. These often-fleeting forms of urban and visual practice generated new ways of acting on and thinking about the city as a space of fluid democratic debate and a stage for creative political citizenship in democracy and dictatorship.

Ephemeral Histories was awarded the 2018 Latin American Studies Historia Reciente y Memoria Section Best Book Award, the 2017 Latin American Studies Southern Cone Studies Section Best Book Prize, the 2017 North England Council of Latin American Studies Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the 2017 Southern Historical Association Latin American and Caribbean Section Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize.

My second book project, “Writing in Dictatorship: Politics, Exile, and Archives in Chile,1973-1990,” explores the everyday experience of power and contest under Pinochet in Chile and abroad. “Writing in Dictatorship” maps the connection between distinct forms of dissent tied together by the political practice of writing, by the line of the pen. Defining writing capaciously and creatively, it explores often-clandestine, often-unspectacular forms of political organizing and association that Chilean citizens built immediately after the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power. It charts, in five different chapters, practices of writing in detention; in the schoolhouse; on the street; in exile; and archival writing.

My third, long term project is a hemispheric history of the Chilean port city of Valparaíso, Chile’s central seaport, in the context of a wider Pacific World from the mid 19th century California Gold Rush to the opening of the Panama Canal in the early 20th century.

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile (UC Press, 2016)

“Chile 1973, September 11: Politics, Protest, and the Making and Unmaking of the Democratic Road to Socialism.” Sebastian Carassai and Kevin Coleman, eds. Coups d’état in Cold War Latin America, 1964-1979 (University of Cambridge Press. In production).

“Exilic Childhoods.” Liisa North, ed., Canada-Chile Solidarity, 1973-1989: Testimonies of Civil Society Action (Ottawa: Novalis Press, 2023).

“How Do You Do Politics in the Street? Art, Design, and the Battle to ‘ganar la calle’ in Chile.” E. Medina, H. Palmarola, and P. Alonso, eds., How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design (Lars Muller Publishers, 2023): 118-139. Bilingual Edition.

“Rethinking the Political History of the Unidad Popular: A view from the street.” Radical Americas, special issue: “Chile’s Popular Unity (UP) Experiment at 50” (January 2021).

"Displacement, Emplacement, and the Politics of Exilic Childhood in Sergio Castilla’s Gringuito." Carl Fischer and Vania Barraza Toledo ed., Chilean Film in the Twenty-First Century World (Wayne State University Press, September 2020).

• Best Book Award, Historia Reciente y Memoria Section, Latin American Studies Association, 2018
• Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize, New England Council of Latin American Studies, 2017
• Best Book Prize in the Humanities, Latin American Studies Association Southern Cone Studies Section, 2017
• Murdo J. MacLeod Book Prize, Southern Historical Assocation, latin American and Caribbean Section (Honorable Mention), 2017
• Latin American Studies Association Southern Cone Studies Section Book Prize for Ephemeral Histories, 2017