Cornell University

“Time Bomb: Toxic Disavowal and American Apocalypse.”

I am a historical and environmental anthropologist studying how people politicize “impure” environments in the long afterlife of American industry. Much of my work is based in Baltimore, where I follow industrialism’s enduring traces in toxified landscapes, patchy regulation, quotidian expressions of white supremacy, and particular orientations toward time. I am especially interested in what kinds of environmental futures take form amid these legacies. 

In my first book, Futures after Progress: Hope and Doubt in Late Industrial Baltimore (University of Chicago Press, 2024), I explore the central role of speculation in American life, from the vantage point of late industrial South Baltimore. The book is based on over a decade of fieldwork among residents, activists, industrialists, and bureaucrats there, and archival study covering more than 200 years. It tells the story of a place forged to enable futures elsewhere: from its early life as a quarantine zone under precautionary public-health regimes; through years spent provisioning the military for both real and speculative warfare; and culminating in plans to build the nation's largest trash incinerator there, billed as a “climate solution” and euphemistically called the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project. Early on, I show how efforts by city, state, nation, and corporation to master the future through ever more conjectural modes of governance have produced an ambiguously toxic atmosphere that has shaved years off locals’ lives. Later, I consider how people living with these burdens relate to the future from a present marked by doubt, after long-held expectations fall apart. Much of the ethnography tracks debates over the proposed incinerator, which were themselves debates about what residents could reasonably desire from within the haze kicked up by an aging industrial order. By following people’s efforts to plant their feet at the end of that world—so uncertain that conjecture has become a mode of life—the book seeks insights into the paths we might yet take, in the face of ecological apocalypse. 

My newer research, on environmentally conscious separatist movements in the Pacific Northwest United States, moves to fresh terrain but stays with these core themes. Specifically, I train my eyes on efforts to repair body, soil, and soul from the “corruptions” of the modern age by establishing a sovereign homeland in “Cascadia”—some liberatory, others decidedly less so, but all grappling with  the legacies of the US settler project. Like Futures after Progress, this work combines ethnographic research with robust archival study, contributing to a research program that lies at the intersection of anthropology and US history.​

My research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and several bodies at Cornell. I also serve on the editorial board for Anthropological Quarterly. At Cornell, I teach courses on time, environment, and research design that draw together fiction, film, critical theory, and ethnographic texts, approaching anthropology as a capacious mode of inquiry.

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