Engagement & Opportunities Workgroup

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 forthcoming book manuscript is on the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, an appellate court with jurisdiction over most of the Caribbean; in it I argue that even though this tribunal faced poverty, enemy attacks, and antagonistic leadership, it was a flexible and durable, if inefficient, component of colonial administration. I have also completed several article-length studies of other aspects of seventeenth-century Spanish Hispaniola, on such topics as conflict among royal officials and the illicit slave trade to the region, while my next project will be a co-authored survey of the development of the trade in enslaved sub-Saharan Africans to Spanish America between 1500 and 1640, together 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.