I am Director of the Medical Humanities program and Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I teach courses on European history, the history of disease and disasters, and the Age of Revolutions. I specialize in the history of medicine and the environment, especially catastrophe and public health crisis management, in eighteenth-century France and the Atlantic World. I have also published on digital history and the future of the historical profession. My work has been featured in The Washington Post (see here and here), The Atlantic, Stat News, The Miami Herald, and El Nuevo Herald, and I have been a guest on BBC World News, Univision, Al-Jazeera, and others.

My book, The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), is a transnational study of the Plague of Provence of 1720 (or Great Plague of Marseille), one of the last outbreaks of plague in Western Europe. By tracing responses to the threat of infection throughout a network of major eighteenth-century port cities, I explore the ways in which the crisis influenced society, politics, and commerce beyond France in neighboring regions and in the Atlantic colonies. The completion of this project was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, McKnight, Ben Weider Fellowship, and the University of Lethbridge.

My second, shorter monograph—called an “Element”—is part of the Cambridge Elements series on Global Urban History. Urban Disasters (Cambridge UP, 2023) is a brief history of catastrophe that looks at case studies from around the globe over the last three-hundred years. It introduces the reader to central concepts that help define the study of disasters and examines the relationship between cities and catastrophes including earthquakes, hurricanes, fires, and epidemics. The book concludes with a brief look at the ongoing effects of climate change and the future of cities.

I’m also the editor of a volume on disaster and risk in the Gulf South that was published with LSU Press in 2018. In my research and in the classroom, I aim to tie my work to the present as much as possible to emphasize the relevance of historical study in the modern world. This edited volume, then, is a product of these efforts, and of my personal interest in the region in which I grew up. I am now at work on a co-authored global history of epidemics that is under contract with the University of California Press.

I’ve conducted archival research in cities across the Atlantic and parts of the Mediterranean, including Paris, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Madrid, Cádiz, Seville, London, Lisbon, Genoa, Rome, Venice, New Orleans, and Washington DC, and I have presented my research at annual meetings for the American Historical Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, and others. In 2023, I was elected as Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

Beyond my research and the classroom, I am also Series Editor for France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization with the University of Nebraska Press (send me a pitch!), as well as co-founder and co-executive editor for the digital, open-access, peer-reviewed publication www.AgeofRevolutions.com, which explores themes and moments in the history of revolutions.

A first-generation Cuban-American, I was raised in Miami, Florida where I discovered my passion for history and became interested in disaster and revolutionary studies. For more on this, see my AoR post, “The Cuban Revolution & Me.”