Overview
My research interests coalesce around two significant questions: How do people develop geographic and cultural identifications? How do geographic regions come into being? In particular, I am interested in the role circulation (of goods, people, news, and ideas) plays in the configuration of geographic spaces, collective identities, geopolitical projects, and political allegiances.
I explore these themes from a Latin American and Caribbean perspective, especially by looking out to the world from the Caribbean coast of Colombia. My first book, An Aqueous Territory, examines the configuration of a transimperial Greater Caribbean and its inhabitants’ geopolitical imagination through a study of the role of sailors in the creation of a regional space and the multiple ways in which less mobile (but by no means static) subjects, including autonomous indigenous groups, sugar planters, military adventurers, and nation makers, experienced the region sailors created.
My broader interests include the emergence of globalization during the early modern period, hemispheric connections and mobilities, the history of late colonial and early national Latin American countries (especially Colombia and its Caribbean region), indigenous-European encounters in the Caribbean Basin, the rise of capitalism, the development of plantation societies in the Caribbean, the flow of ideas, people, and commodities across the Atlantic Ocean, and the role of oceans in world history.
I am from Colombia and without a student visa I would not have been able to pursue doctoral studies nor become a professor at Cornell. I teach students to understand the process of creation of patriotic narratives and to identify the purposes behind those narratives, as well as the multiple perspectives these narratives seek to erase. I think international students are an important part of what makes U.S. universities and the U.S. great.
Publications
- An Aqueous Territory: Sailor Geographies and New Granada’s Transimperial Greater Caribbean World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
- (with Javier Puente) "A Revolution in Knowledge: The Intellectual Legacy of Visa Holders in the United States. A Permanent Work in Progress," Age of Revolutions: An Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Academic Journal (July 2020).
- “Small Islands in a Geopolitically Unstable Caribbean World,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History (March 2019).
- “The Franklins of Colombia: Immigration Schemes and Hemispheric Solidarity in the Making of a Civilised Colombia,” Journal of Latin American Studies 50, 3 (August 2018): 673-701.
- “Neither a Spanish nor U.S. Lake: The Caribbean, a Region in Its Own Right,” The American Historian (May 2018): 27-33.
- “Enabling, Implementing, Experiencing Entanglement: Empires, Sailors, and Coastal Peoples in a British-Spanish Southern Caribbean Milieu, 1780s-1810s,” in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (ed.), Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 217-235.
- “Much More than the Half Has Never Been Told: Narrating the Rise of Capitalism from New Granada’s Shores,” The Latin Americanist 61, 4 (December 2017): 529-550.
- "The Space Between,” The Appendix 2, 4 (December 2014).
- “Beyond Compartmentalized Atlantics: A Case for Embracing the Atlantic from Spanish American Shores,” History Compass 12, 9 (2014): 704-716.
In the news
- Noted life of an “Atlantic Creole” focus of Becker Lectures
- A.D. White Professors are named; fall visits announced
- Einaudi awards fund global research and activities
- Quechua language instruction returns to Cornell
- Nicaraguan cartoonist finds refuge at Einaudi Center
- Community of practice explores digital storytelling in the classroom
- Einaudi welcomes new program directors and opportunities
- Caribbean studies finds home at Einaudi Center
- Class creates virtual exhibition exploring Atlantic odyssey
- Historian re-examines Caribbean history in new book
