I study how Europeans and Indigenous peoples made knowledge about nature, health, and place in the colonial Northeast — and what was gained, lost, and transformed in the encounter.

My work sits at the intersection of the history of science, environmental history, and the history of medicine in the early modern Atlantic world. I’m interested in how encounters — between peoples, and between people and the plants, animals, and landscapes they moved through — shaped what came to be known about North America. I’m especially drawn to how the Indigenous peoples who had lived in this “New World” for millennia adapted to the ecological upheavals of colonialism and helped shape what would become the environmental and health sciences.

My first book, A Not-So-New World: Empire and Environment in French Colonial North America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), argued that French science in the New World was built in conversation with the Indigenous peoples who knew that world best — even as it was profoundly shaped by the ambitions of French colonialism. My current research turns to the epidemics of the seventeenth-century Northeast, tracing how disease shaped encounters across New France, New England, and New Netherland.

I’ve taught at Northeastern since 2013 in the Department of History and the Health, Humanities, and Society program. Before that I was a Barra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and I hold a PhD from the University of Toronto.