University of British Columbia

Faculty Member, History

About

My current research revolves around a book project, Talking Machines: Histories of Sound, Violence and Technology in the Caribbean, which records the unwritten histories of radio and related sonic technologies in the Caribbean. Drawing from recent scholarship that traces networks as they cross, ignore, or in some instances, reify national borders, my research attends to media and communications technologies driven by capital flows, imperial projects and regional political mobilizations.  It elucidates the configurations of power that determined the delivery of information, shaping the social and political lives of Caribbean people in significant ways. It also contributes new narratives to the intersecting fields of sound studies and histories of science and empire. In particular, my analysis makes violence central to the process of the translation of technology, and will challenge scholarship that has bypassed its role in the making of the aural past.
My first book centered on the histories of social science and race in Cuba. In addition, I have published book on the recent history of the Caribbean with a particular focus on the circulation of goods, information, and people. My interest in sound and technology remains within a broad set of questions related to networks of knowledge production, cultural practices and imperial legacies, but it also opens new avenues of inquiry for historians of the region, who have thus far neglected the histories of media and sonic technologies.