Personal Statement
I am a historian of the German, British, and Dutch empires, the history of science and the environment, and global history in the long nineteenth century. I am primarily interested in subjects related to natural history collecting and collections; non-human and multispecies histories; museums; botany and botanic gardens; taxonomy; and biodiversity loss and climate change, particularly in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa.

I hold BA degrees in History and Anthropology from the University of South Carolina and an MA in European History from UCL. I earned a PhD in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2021) and have held teaching positions at the LSE (2021-22) and the University of Liverpool (2022-23), and worked as Director of Academic Programs at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU München (2023-24).

I have previously held research posts and fellowships at the University of Cape Town (2018), Freie Universität Berlin (2019), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (2024), and Cambridge University Herbarium and Botanic Garden (2026). I have also received prestigious awards from funding bodies such as the LSE, the German History Society, the Royal Society, the Royal Historical Society, and DAAD. My PhD dissertation received Honorable Mention in both the German Historical Institute London Dissertation Prize (2022) and the 7th Dissertation Prize for the Division for the History of Science and Technology (DHST) in the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (IUHPST) (2023), and one of its chapters was awarded the German History Society Essay Prize (2021). My teaching practice has also been recognized: I was awarded the LSE Class Teacher Award (2022) and received several nominations for the LSE Student Union Teaching Awards (2022) for inclusive education and inspirational teaching.

Research Overview
My work is dedicated to the relationship between plants, empire, and society in the past and present.

My first book, entitled 'Economies of Nature: German Expertise and Natural History Collecting in Southern Africa', is being written for the ‘Science in History’ series with Cambridge University Press. Drawn from my doctoral research, the book tells a story about how competition in natural history collecting and the singularity of southern African plant life upended practices of European knowledge-making in the first half of the nineteenth century. Tracing the largely untold stories of German commercial collectors, Indigenous labor, and non-human agents, 'Economies of Nature' demonstrates the pivotal role that southern Africa played in unsettling how Europeans ordered colonial and natural worlds. What is unique about this work (and my work more generally) is its engagement with historical natural history collections and that it links historical research to contemporary debates on biodiversity loss and plant conservation in southern Africa. This research makes a bold new intervention by placing plants at the center of a story on empire in southern Africa – perhaps the only book to do so to date.

Outside of the book, I am currently writing on several different topics for articles and book chapters, including: the Unio Itineraria and nineteenth-century German scientific societies; parasitism in science, imperial ideology, and anti-colonial thought; the Kew Gardens Colonial Floras project; the legal case involving Friedrich Welwitsch's Angolan botanical collections; plant conservation in the Cape Floristic Region; and natural history collections and climate change. Likewise, I am co-editing a special issue for History & Philosophy of the Life Sciences with Elaine Ayers (Yale University) tentatively titled 'Death, Decay, and Loss in Colonial Botany’.