Department of History Staff

My work focuses on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean, especially on the administrative framework that connected the region with Spain and the monarch, and on the first century and a half of the transatlantic slave trade to Spanish territories. My first book, The Audiencia of Santo Domingo in the Seventeenth Century: Justice and Royal Authority in the Spanish Caribbean (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), received an honorable mention for the Bandelier-Lavrin Book Prize from the Rocky Mountain Council for Latin American Studies. In it, I argue that even though the audiencia (an appellate court with jurisdiction over most of the Caribbean) faced poverty, enemy attacks, and antagonistic leadership, it was a flexible and durable, if somewhat inefficient, component of colonial administration. I have also published a number of articles and book chapters, on such topics as conflict among royal officials and the illicit slave trade to the region during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My next project is a comprehensive survey of the early trade in enslaved sub-Saharan Africans to Spanish America between 1500 and 1650, co-authored with David Wheat of Michigan State University.

In conjunction with the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences, I regularly teach the Introduction to Latin America survey course, and am the director for the Latin American Studies minor program. I also teach courses on Colonial Latin America and Modern Latin America, as well as the World History I survey, and upper-division and graduate courses on the history of Mexico, U.S.-Latin American relations, or Piracy in Global History. In the future, I hope to develop additional courses on such topics as Latino history and popular culture in Latin America.