In 2024, the Journal of Energy History published my peer-reviewed article "Provisioning Parks in Petrochemical America: Origins and Legacies of the Land and Water Conservation Fund" in a special issue on environmental histories of the oil industry.
 

The article revises existing celebratory accounts of 1960s US conservation policy by showing how the attachment of federal offshore oil and gas revenues to national and state park funding models in that decade primarily serviced the needs of the oil and gas industry, while advancing covertly eugenic priorities. It has been nominated for two prizes this year by senior scholars: the Catherine Bauer Wurster Prize and the Alice Hamilton Prize.​

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In 2026, Rutgers University Press will publish my peer-reviewed contribution to New Jersey’s Natures: Environmental Histories of the Garden State, edited by Raechel Lutz. In this piece, I clarify the competing ways in which industrial and racialized aims and environmental justice counter-movements shaped New Jersey planning practices and historic attempts to build parks along the Lower Passaic River from the 1890s into the 2020s.

 

I developed these two publications separately from my dissertation project over the course of my Ph.D. They provide a basis for my next book project: a history of how American parks planning practices were shaped by distinct racial aims and political economies of energy production and consumption in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I will continue my research for this project this summer with the support of a John Nolen Research Grant from the Cornell University Manuscripts & Archives.

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In addition to my peer-reviewed history scholarship, public history and digital humanities work are important aspects of my research and writing agenda.

 

I am currently a contributor to Our Land, Our Stories, a multimedia project dedicated to sharing Native history and advancing environmental justice advocacy in New Jersey, developed in collaboration with the Ramapough Lunaape Nation.

 

My recent contribution to Our Land, Our Stories uses maps, herbaria specimens, treaty documents, and archival research to clarify a key condition that has been, for too long, left out of histories of colonial America: the fact that a large portion of the New Jersey Meadowlands once served as a crucial wild rice harvesting grounds for Lenape peoples.

 

The digital map-story I developed for Our Land, Our Stories is part of a larger series, in-development, titled "Plants and Munsee Lenape Lifeways in the New Jersey Meadowlands." This series stems from my dissertation research and work I began as a 2023-2024 Fellow at the American Philosophical Society's Center for Digital Scholarship.

 

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Extending my engagement with public audiences and contributing dialogues to the field of urban history, I published two essays on the Urban History Association's The Metropole this year.

 

The first essay, "Engineering Nature, Igniting Risk: LA's Fires and a Century of Landscape Manipulation", was shared widely online and was featured on the University of Richmond’s Bunk History as a top piece of history-writing. It marshals findings from my undergraduate thesis research and my dissertation to clarify how a century of hydrological manipulation, road-building, and engineered desiccation contributed to the 2025 LA Fires.

 

The second essay, "Healing Wounds of Light: Birds, Cities and the Fast, Slow, and Forgotten Violence of Artificial Illumination,"  examines the long history of how birds, cities, and even humans have been affected by different urban lighting technologies over the centuries. It seeks to encourage historians and readers to move beyond celebrations of urban lighting systems’ brilliance, to recognize and mediate the extents of these systems' historical and ongoing brutalities. I developed this essay while writing my dissertation with the support of a Yale University Law, Environment and Animals Program Grant.​​