What kind of an impact do you hope your project will have–whether on your field, the community, our campus, etc.?
I am working on the first project-- the article on outer space-- for the journal LABOR, where I hope it will be published in 2027. The second project, which was a student and community conversation with attorney and founder of the Safe Jobs, Healthy Families organization, Amanda Hawes, happened in the Fall of 2025.
I am also hoping that this event with Hawes will be the first of many dialogues between myself, her, and Santa Clara University about her historical legacy and in particular, her papers and professional archive, the preservation of which I believe is deeply historically significant.
Why do you think the humanities are important?
People are important. And because people are important, we must prioritize studying their history, their forms of social organization, we must teach young people all that we know and all that we have to share with them so that they can best think and dream, and we must expose them to as many ideas and tools as we possibly can so that they can live the best lives they possibly can. For me, the humanities are a number of disciplines of mind with rich traditions that help us understand what it is to be human, and how we can best treat each other well and take care of each other. Many of the questions that ultimately, arise, ask whether our collective well being is unbreakably bound up in the well being of other humans. I believe that studying the humanities disciplines the mind in order to liberate it.
What does (re) imagining futures mean to you?
Historians are always trying to show contingency in our work. We try our best to write about the past as though history is not predetermined, and that, in any given moment, the future is always up for grabs. As an historian I believe that, as humans, as a collective of people, we make our own collective future. And what we do matters, how we treat each other and organize ourselves, and our society, and our labor, matters for our own futures and the lives of the people who will come after us.
We, as people, don't necessarily make our futures on the terms that we choose: conditions are what they are, and we need to grasp, as precisely as possible, what those conditions are at any given point in order to reimagine the future ahead of us at any given moment.
A crucial part of that, both disciplinarily and temperamentally, is a deep commitment to an ongoing refusal to acquiesce to a logic whereby a tiny class of a handful people determine the future of billions more. To me, the demand of imagining and reimagining the future is a constant call to collective power.