I am a historian of modern Latin America and interdisciplinary scholar specializing in the history of twentieth-century Mexico. My work puts nursing history into dialogue with ethnohistory (Indigenous history) and my research focuses on the southern state of Oaxaca. My broader research and teaching interests center on the history of medicine, gender, development, and ethnohistory in Latin America.

In 2023, I earned my doctorate from Emory University and my dissertation won the Best Dissertation Prize from the Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and the Teresa E. Christy Award from the American Association for the History of Nursing (AAHN). It received an honorable mention for the Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize from the Latin American & Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association (SHA). I was formerly a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Healthcare History and Policy at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University and completed an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship in 2025.

My current book project, tentatively titled The Backbone of Rural Health: Nursing and Indigenous Healing in Oaxaca, is an ethnohistory of rural nursing in the multilingual and multiethnic state of Oaxaca. My project interweaves medical, Indigenous language, state-produced, and ethnographic sources from the 1930s through the early 1970s. I examine how nurses and Indigenous communities implemented, responded to, and adapted rural health and development projects on the ground. I argue that the federal government began hiring bilingual Indigenous nurses in response to years’ worth of petitions sent from Indigenous municipal authorities and suggestions made by doctors and visiting nurses who worked in these rural spaces in the 1930s and 1940s. Rural nurses and Indigenous authorities therefore shaped health policy and practices by pressuring the government to accommodate their needs and expectations.

I have an article forthcoming with Ethnohistory titled “Si la información traduce:” Mixtec Translation, Health Education, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Oaxaca.” The manuscript uses a linguistic analysis of Spanish and Mixtec-language sources to center the role of uncredited Indigenous co-translators and their work on health education materials in the 1950s.

• HIST151H – Health and Healing in Latin America
• HIST250C – Foundations of Latin American History: the Twentieth Century to the Present

• 2025  Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award in 20^th Century History of Medicine or Biomedical Sciences, American Association for the History of Medicine
• 2025  Best Dissertation Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association
• 2024  American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship
• 2024  Teresa E. Christy Award, American Association for the History of Nursing
• 2024  Richmond Brown Dissertation Prize, Honorable Mention, Latin American & Caribbean Section of the Southern Historical Association
• 2021  H-31 Pre-Doctoral Grant, American Association for the History of Nursing
• 2019-20  Fulbright Hays- Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, United States Department of Education