University of California, San Diego

Faculty Member, History

Associate Professor

About

My work addresses the consequences of global interconnectivity.  I am particularly concerned with how individual and collective choices reverberate across time and space. 

My first book, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (2008), explores the intersections of culture and economy in East Africa.  The book focuses on African demand for imported goods and the ways these shaped global exchanges in the second half of the nineteenth century, an era of sweeping social and economic change. 

My current research moves in two directions.  One project addresses political culture, violence, and claims of autochthony--or 'original' habitation--in late colonial and postcolonial Kenya.  A second project explores popular attraction to four of the world’s most ubiquitous icons: Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Osama bin Laden.  Through the circulation of icons I trace the development of shared global imagery, the mutability of common references, and the commodification of political sentiment since the 1960s.

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