红杏视频

I am immensely proud to be both a former student and, now, a scholar and teacher in the University of Victoria’s department of History. Raised in Surrey, British Columbia, I pursued pre-med and history courses at Kwantlen Polytechnic University before transferring to UVic and entering the History Honours program. I received my MA from 红杏视频 (2008) and my PhD from the University of British Columbia (2018), and held fellowships at Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Sussex, Newberry Library, and the New York Botanical Garden. I then joined the University of Delaware in 2019, and finally, the University of Victoria in 2025. 

My work centers on the history of science and empire. My first book, Indexing the Indigenous: Plants, Peoples, and Empire (under contract, Johns Hopkins University Press), examines the varied ways that Indigenous plant knowledges have figured in nineteenth-century imperial botany and anthropology. Drawing on science studies and Indigenous critical approaches, and using examples drawn from Tahiti, the Himalayas, and especially Aotearoa New Zealand, this book shows how Indigenous botanical vocabularies have served as currency both for colonial scientific fieldwork and Indigenous cultural perseverance. 

My second book project, “Fields of Empire: Science, Ethnoscience, and the American Century,” investigates how ethnobotanists and ethnoecologists interfaced with twentieth-century American colonizing interests in Sumatra and the Philippines. I also have three edited book projects underway. The first, Plants in Translation: Global Diasporas and Local Entanglements (co-edited with Tamara Caulkins and Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, under contract with University of Pittsburgh Press) examines the history of plant translations—linguistic, cultural, material, and ecological—in botany and related areas from the late medieval period to the present. I am also editing  A Cultural History of Nature in the Nineteenth Century (under contract with Bloomsbury) and a primary source collection on Plants for Gender, Colonialism, and Science (co-edited with Tina Gianquitto, under contract with Routledge). 

Selected Publications 

2022 “Tangled Compositions: Botany, Agency, and Authorship aboard HMS Endeavour,” History of Science 60:2, pp. 183-210. 

2022 “Colonial Histories of Plant-Based Pharmaceuticals,” with Jaipreet Virdi, special issue for History of Pharmacy and Pharmaceuticals 63:2. 

 2022 “The Representation of Plants,” in A Cultural History of Plants, vol. 6: A Cultural History of Plants in the Modern Age, ed. Stephen Forbes (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 171-91. 

2020 “Boas in the Age of BLM and Idle No More: Re-evaluating the Boasian Legacy,” History of Anthropology Newsletter. 

2018 “Imperial Vernacular: Phytonymy, Philology, and Disciplinarity in the Indo-Pacific,” British Journal for the History of Science 51:4, pp. 635-58.

2016  “Between Māori and Modern? The Case of Mānuka Honey,” in Appreciating Local Knowledge, ed. Elisabeth Kapferer, Andreas Koch and Clemens Sedmak (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 61-76.

2016  “Tensions in the World of Moon: Twin Peaks, Indigeneity and Territoriality,” Senses of Cinema 79.