My research and teaching are located at the intersection of environmental, economic, and European history. My scholarship excavates the histories of major contemporary global phenomena, from the international agricultural trade system and climate change, to the primacy of economics in political life and the centrality of free markets to the liberal democratic state.
While my primary point of reference for thinking through these questions is modern France, my research and teaching often transcend national boundaries, following commodities, actors, and ideas as they circulate in global markets. Methodologically, I am a social and cultural historian who uses the experiences of non-elite actors, as well as larger symbolic ontologies, to understand how state-led economic practices determined the shape of everyday life.
My first book, Organic Resistance: The Struggle Over Industrial Farming in Postwar France (UNC Press 2018), was awarded the J. Russell Major Prize from the American Historical Association, as well as an honourable mention for the Society for French Historical Studies' Pinkney Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Canadian Historical Association's Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, and the Council for European Studies' European Studies Book Award. With this research I traced the transformation of the French agricultural sector from a backward also-ran into a global powerhouse. Driven by state policies to modernise the French economy in the wake of the Second World War, French agriculture abandoned centuries-old methods, upending rural labour systems and the nation’s physical environment, to become one of the most powerful industries in the world.
I am currently working on a new project titled, "Unsafe Harbour: A Political Ecology of Postwar Marseille." This research is rooted in the intersecting histories of industrial pollution, economic development, immigration, and urban planning. To pull these disparate and yet intimately connected threads together, I am organising the research around a single legal case. In the mid-1950s, residents of what is likely the most famous building in Marseille, Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation, sued a preeminent industrialist, claiming that the ricin emissions of his nearby factory were to blame for their debilitating respiratory ailments. The case eventually made its way to the French Supreme Court, where the decision in favour of the plaintiffs was upheld. Using the suit as a springboard, I will then move on to discuss the rise of the plastics industry (heavily reliant on ricin), early attempts at corporate greenwashing, the toxic burden of immigrant labour (over half of the workers at the ricin factory were foreign), and the spatial politics of economic development and environmental degradation. It is no coincidence, for instance, that affluent residential neighbourhoods have enjoyed superior air quality. In thinking about the geography of the city through the lens of political ecology, I will demonstrate how forms of inequality that were initially predicated on immigration patterns were then exacerbated by uneven access to healthy environments.