I am a social and cultural historian of the early modern Atlantic World, with interest in African diaspora, contraband trade, and environmental history. My current book project, Witchcraft and Contraband in the Early Modern Caribbean, investigates the intersections of illicit spiritual practices and illicit trade in the Caribbean from 1600 to 1640. The book focuses on a multi-ethnic community of single, economically independent, and surprisingly mobile African and Iberian women who were accused of witchcraft by the Inquisitorial courts of Mexico and Cartagena. Reading their cases alongside the institutional history of the American Inquisitions and contraband trade, I interpret this community as an early modern trading diaspora.

My first book, Veracruz and the Caribbean in the Seventeenth Century, examined the Mexican port city of Veracruz. The book elaborate's Veracruz's material relationships with the Caribbean Islands, demonstrating how exchanges of environment, goods, and people laid the groundwork for similar social and cultural institutions that, in turn, defined local concepts of race, caste, and ethnicity that differed significantly from those in use elsewhere in Mexico. It appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2023.

Beyond these projects, my research has examined the relationship between Mexico's northern borderlands and the Caribbean; the slave trade in the Gulf-Caribbean region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and the longue-durée history of contraband in the Caribbean. I also have long-range interest in climate history and am slowly working on a biographical project on the early Caribbean historian Irene Aloha Wright.

I teach courses on Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World from the colonial to the modern period, as well as thematic and global courses on the histories of environment, empire, disaster, and race.​​​