About

I am currently a doctoral student at the University of Notre Dame where I study African subject formation in colonial Latin America. I am interested in the confrontation and/or comity this group experienced with the Catholic religion as an institutional body and as a site of transcendent spiritual intercourse. These revelations, I hope, will draw poignant insights into religion’s role in the body politic and how subjective and objective religious experiences strengthen or corrupt the nation-building project. As meta-narratives within this larger ensemble, I am intrigued by diasporic identity formation and how this can be analyzed to better understand the successes and failures of multicultural projects. It is fascinating to me how these ideas can be studied in an 'early modern' context while still bearing extraordinary relevance today as we all are affected/effected by dominant narratives, locating sites of solidarity, and grappling with 'the other' (as in, society's other).

I am originally from Portland, Oregon and received a B.A. in History & a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Oregon. I later obtained my M.A. in Hispanic Literature and Cultures at the University of Illinois at Chicago.