Academic interests
I am interested in ethnohistory, environmental history, Latin America studies, archival studies, and animal studies.
In my doctoral dissertation, Restorying Archival Animals: Endemic and epistemic species in Mexico’s colonial archives, I examine practices of collecting and archiving in late‑colonial Mexico to recover how animals were transformed as they moved from lived environments into archival collections. Drawing on critical archival studies, environmental history, and the history of science, the research intervenes in the cultural history of collecting by noticing the archival animal: animals and their associated material traces serve both as preserved records for historical inquiry and as active sites where knowledge was made and remade.
The study combines analysis of pictorial and textual sources, inventories and correspondence from European and New World naturalists and expeditionists, and archival materials documenting expeditionary and collecting practices. It also attends to material practices—preparation, taxidermy, specimen labelling—and to the labour networks that enabled collection and preservation. These sources are cross-contextualised to recover forms of knowledge that textual sources often elide. I show that animals removed from endemic contexts were re‑situated within epistemic spaces that transformed and embedded into them new meanings: seasonal rhythms, multispecies relations, ritual protocols, and local orientations were often abstracted into classificatory labels, visual material, and display logics that privileged colonial logic. The project traces how such transformation produced losses and reconfigurations as much as it produced new kinds of knowledge.
Teaching
- KULH2006: Cultural Theory (Autumn 2026)
- KULH1001: Europas kulturhistorie (Autumn 2026)
- KOS1500: Bridging Humanities and Medicine for Sustainable Change (Autumn 2026)
Background
2023-2026: Doctoral Research Fellow, Cultural History and Museology, IKOS, University of Oslo
2018-2020: Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters Degree, Crossways in Cultural Narratives
2020: Laurea Magistrale (MA), Culture Moderne Comparate. Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy
2019: Máster Universitario (MA), Encrucilladas nas narrativas culturais. Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain
2018: Master of Letters (MLitt), Crossways in Cultural Narratives. University of Saint Andrews, Scotland
2012-2016: Licenciatura (BA Hons), Lengua y literaturas modernas, Letras inglesas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico
Appointments
- 2022-2024 Honorary Associate Research Fellow. Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (HASS). University of Exeter.
Conference organisation
May 2025: “ReOrient: Active archives and (counter)colonial spaces.” International conference at Uppsala University, sponsored by the European Commission and the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Initiation Grant. Organised with Patrick Anthony and Hirra Ateeq.
March 2023: Imaginando Futuros, Encuentro III: “Conocimientos Indígenas y Tradicionales”. International Conference of the Imagining Futures Network in Yucatan, Mexico. Organised with Daniela Mussali and Olin Moctezuma
Grants
- 2022–2023 Animating cycles for living and archiving the foodways of a Maya community in Yucatan. Imagining Futures Phase 2 commissioned project, UK, as co-investigator.