I am Associate Professor of History at Columbia University and research/teach modern United States, Latino/x, labor, immigration, and borderlands history, as well as food history and the craft of oral history. I previously taught at Stony Brook University and directed its Latin/x American and Caribbean Studies Center and Program.
I am the author of the new book Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to COVID-19 (UNC Press, 2025), which traces how the United States’ tandem appetite for Latinx food and Latinx food labor evolved from World War II to COVID. My award-winning first book, Grounds for Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement (Yale University Press, 2016), analyzed the historical relationships between Mexican Americans, braceros, and undocumented immigrants in their struggles for civil and labor rights in California’s Salinas Valley. I am also co-editor of the revised edition of The Academic’s Handbook (Duke University Press, 2020).
I have received fellowships for my research and writing from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Ford Foundation. In my free time I enjoy traveling, kayaking, running, and photography.
Contact Me
Email me! I am serving as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer until 2026, and can be booked for a talk or event through the OAH.
You can download a recent CV here.
Photo: Ananda Shorey