Degrees

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2019
M.A., University of British Columbia, 2011
B.A., St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, 2009

Research Interests

I am working on a book titled “Insurgent Care: Reimagining the Health Work of Filipina Women, 1870–1948,” which documents Filipina women’s medical knowledge, migration, and labor across the U.S. empire.  I use a wide archive of sources, including botany, visual culture, medicine, and demography, and draw on critical ethnic studies and women of color feminist frameworks.  I am also committed to thinking and writing about Asian American history within a global perspective.

Teaching Interests

Influenced by my research, in the classroom I highlight ways of knowing that are often marginalized, such as intellectual contributions by and about women of color.  I critique biases in knowledge production by having students examine documents that sound objective, but are premised on flawed understandings about racial differences, such as newspapers that praise Asian Americans as the model minority and scientific journals that justify experimentation on colonized people. I encourage students to examine the ways American imperialism is embedded in our everyday lives. By assigning cookbooks, comic books, and folklore, I take seriously subjugated forms of knowledge, such as indigenous epistemologies and informal communication systems like rumor and gossip. I show how folktales about women and monsters can be a conduit to talk publicly about taboo subjects like miscarriage and maternal grief.

Selected Publications

“Between Caregiving and Soldiering: Filipina Non-citizens and Relational Settler Militarisms in the U.S. and Israel,” Amerasia Journal Special Issue-Rethinking Gendered Citizenship: Intimacy, Sovereignty, and Empire (Co-authored with Attewell, W. and Pangilinan, J.).

“Nursing the Nation: Examining the History of Early Migrant Nurses and the Origins of University Nursing Programs in the Philippines” in Global Migration, Gender, and Professional Credentials, ed. Margaret Walton-Roberts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, in press.

Awards and Honors

Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society, Indiana University, 2019–2021

Oral History Fellow, VOCES Oral History Research Summer Institute, University of Texas, 2020

Summer Research Institute on the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Huntington Library, 2019

Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018–2019

Balsillie School for International Affairs in Globalization Summer Institute, University of Waterloo, 2017

Rockefeller Archive Center Grant-In-Aide Research Fellowship, 2016

Eugene Garfield Research Fellowship, American Philosophical Society, 2016

Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Research Fellowship, 2016