About

I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where I also co-direct the Public Humanities program and am affiliated with the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program. I teach courses like Food Ethnography, American Food, Global Americas, Introduction to Public Humanities, and Approaches to American Studies.

My research sits at the intersection of food, migration, labor, and storytelling. Much of my work focuses on New Orleans and Central America—especially Honduras—and looks at how immigrant communities shape food cultures, labor politics, and everyday life. My book, Rebuilding New Orleans: Immigrant Laborers and Street Food Vendors in the Post-Katrina Era (UNC Press, 2025), explores how Central American and Mexican migrants helped rebuild the city after Hurricane Katrina while navigating exploitative working conditions, immigration enforcement, and the hustle of the informal economy.

I also enjoy working collaboratively on public-facing projects. Drawing from my research, I co-produced two documentary shorts for the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown Foodways series—El Camino del Pan a Baltimore and El Camino del Mole a New Orleans—which screened at the Maryland Film Festival and the New Orleans Film Festival. I’m currently working on a collaborative documentary film series about the long relationship between New Orleans and Honduras. During the 2025–2026 year, my collaborators and I developed this project while in residence at A Studio in the Woods, an environmental arts residency in New Orleans.

I was a 2022–2024 Whiting Public Engagement Fellow for Project Neutral Grounds: At the Intersection of People, Food, and the Hustle, a project about street food vendors in New Orleans. I also led the ACLS-funded project Baltimore Field School 2.0: Undoing and Doing Anew in Public Humanities, which focuses on building collaborative research with community partners.

My public humanities work has included collaborations with organizations like the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, the Southern Foodways Alliance, and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice. I have written for places like the New York Times, NACLA, and Gravy magazine.

Before academia, I spent four years in Paraguay as a Peace Corps volunteer, worked with immigrant worker organizations in Kentucky, and later moved to New Orleans for graduate school. I grew up in Kentucky, where much of my dad’s family is Italian Appalachian. My grandfather ran a local restaurant, Eat at Don’s, and my mom worked front of house at Science Hill, in Shelbyville, Kentucky. Those early experiences sparked my curiosity about how food and community shape each other.

I enjoy costuming (haven’t missed a Mardi Gras since 2011), basketball, fishing (an old hobby I’m not very good at), foraging (a new hobby I’m also not very good at), cooking, and playing cards—mostly bridge these days. Recently, I’ve also picked up an interest in quilting.