Research

My research has investigated a range of topics including: photography and its use in early anthropology and expeditionary science;  science, race and nationalism; heritage politics and archaeology; travel and tourism; community and religious formation, and food, gender and nostalgia in Peru. 

Currently I am working on two book projects. The first examines the cultivation of Peru as a food nation with a particular focus on women cooks and their assistants from 1940-1960. I juxtapose this period with the present gastronomic boom in Peru to understand how gender, nostalgia and imaginaries of national heritage are central to neoliberal food futures. 

The second project stems from my research on photography and its use in early anthropometric and expeditionary science. Tentatively titled Out of Focus: Stories Beyond the Frame, the book examines the unpublished photographs of the Yale Peruvian Expeditions (1911, 1912, 1914-15) led by Hiram Bingham to explore the many untold stories contained in the thousands of photographs taken across the three expeditions.