I am an advanced doctoral student in history at Yale with a prior doctorate in developmental biology from the University of Chicago.

My research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of environment, science, and labor, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth-century Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds.

My dissertation, “The Making of the Modern Reef: Science, Extraction, and the Material Afterlives of Decolonization,” is a comparative history of how coral reefs became objects of science, extraction, and governance across the twentieth century. Focusing on Sri Lanka, Belize, and the American Gulf Coast, it reconstructs the intellectual and material histories through which reefs were seen, valued, and remade—from rock to reservoir, liability, collateral, and infrastructure. Each site serves as a case study of a region where reefs have received scant attention, in contrast to the Great Barrier Reef’s enduring dominance over both public and scholarly imaginaries. By drawing on geospatial mapping, text data mining, and oral histories, I show how ways of seeing reefs were entangled with the valuation of nature from the late nineteenth century to the present. Colonial and post-colonial scientists, extractivist industries, nation-states, and conservationist companies, among others, not only attached affective qualities to a reef but, in doing so, came to define the reef itself.

Across these contexts, I trace how scientific, legal, economic, and political expertise produced multiple, often conflicting ontologies of the reef, even as coastal environments were absorbed into projects of state-making and capital accumulation. The dissertation follows these transformations through specific material histories: limestone and cement in postcolonial Ceylon, petroleum geology in British Honduras, the juridical conversion of rigs into reefs in the Gulf of Mexico, and conservation finance in Belize’s “blue bond.” It also examines how reefs became the material basis of sovereignty claims, military strategy, and designed infrastructures. By tracing these conceptual systems, I show that the contemporary “ecological” reef—often quantified in terms of ecosystem services and monetary value—is only the most recent iteration in a longer history of converting the living and nonliving into commensurable forms of capital.

My sources include colonial and postcolonial administrative archives, government reports, land grants, legislation, newspapers, maps, and corporate and scientific records spanning fisheries science, engineering, development economics, petroleum geology, hydrology, conservation finance, and ecology. I pair these materials with a historical-ethnographic approach to the present. The dissertation builds on my earlier work at the University of Chicago, where my MA traced a multiscalar history of coral reef science at the Great Barrier Reef—from oceanography to microbiology and genomics—across the long nineteenth century.

I am deeply interested in multidisciplinary, public-facing, and trans-regional methods and pedagogies for studying the past. My broader aim is to examine global environmental thought, capital accumulation, and state-building, particularly in the context of capitalism and decolonization, while also engaging with STS, and comparative literature.

I am a Graduate Writing Fellow at the Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning at Yale and a Franke Interdisciplinary Fellow in the Sciences and Humanities. My work has been generously supported by the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies, the South Asia Studies Council, the Franke Program in Sciences and the Humanities, and the Marine Biological Laboratory.