About
"Recalled to life..."*
I am a professor, writer, and editor interested in the history of Inca and Andean healing and ancestor-making, and the grave-robbing and archaeology that moved Andean mummies to museums in Peru and the Americas. I received my B.A. in Latin American Studies from Yale University and my Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. I am an assistant professor of Modern Latin American History at the Pennsylvania State University, and a former Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A former journalist, I still write for general audiences on museums, racial science, and the Incas.
At Penn State, I teach and train students in the colonial and modern history of Peru and the Americas, and historical writing as a craft. I regularly teach Latin American History from Independence to the Present, the History of the Incas, Race and Nation in Latin America, and U.S.-Latin American Relations. I accept graduate student inquiries in the history of science, race, empire, and post-colonialism in the Andes and United States. I believe in a Latin America that has always been modern, whose ideas, culture, and political commitments have shaped the wider Americas and world.
These commitments shape my writing. My most recent book, Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2023) is a history of the collection of Inca mummies, “ancient Peruvian” skulls, and Andean healing practices, from the Spanish invasion of the Inca empires of Tawantinsuyo in 1532 through Peru’s present fame as an epicenter of global archaeology. It explains why Inca empire and Andean peoples healed their dead, making more permanent ancestors, which colonial and republican sciences reduced to mummies and skulls—a move that supported Spanish rule but also the development of museums and Americanist anthropology Peru, the United States, and the wider Americas. It’s also about how everyday and elite Andean, Inca, and Peruvian individuals “dug back,” using grave-opening and anthropology to celebrate their ancestors as healers, and to argue for a less imperial vision of Andean history. My research for this project was undertaken in museums and archives in Peru and the United States, and was funded by a Fulbright Student Fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Fellowship to Peru, and a Barra Postdoctoral Fellowship at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and smaller grants from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the Philadelphia Area Council for the History of Science, and UT Austin, where I was a Harrington Doctoral Fellow and a Jess Hay Chancellor’s Fellow.
My first book, Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), was a history of the scientific discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911 and the controversy caused by Yale explorer Hiram Bingham's excavation and exportation of the Inca site's 174 human remains and thousands of artifacts in 1912. Through research in Yale archives, the US National Archives, and personal archives in Cusco and Lima, Peru, I showed that Bingham had committed to the Machu Picchu collection’s return. I also discovered the Yale Peruvian Expedition had smuggled artifacts to the United States in 1915, prompting an investigation in Peru and the end of Bingham’s career as an explorer. Upon publication, this book shaped negotiations between Yale and Peru over the final status of Machu Picchu's artifacts in 2010, motivating Yale alumni to seek the settlement of the longstanding legal feud. In 2011, the Machu Picchu collection was finally returned to an institution run by the University of Cusco, prompting an updated edition of Cradle of Gold. The following year, the book’s definitive edition was translated into Spanish as Las Tumbas de Machu Picchu (PUCP, 2012) and published in Lima. You can learn more about those books here.
My commitment to connecting my research findings to both academics and a wider audience began with my time as a facilitator in New York for the national oral history and radio project StoryCorps in 2005. I have written on Machu Picchu, Einstein's Brain, apocalyptic prophecies, Indiana Jones, museum exhibits, “cocaine mummies,” and writers 'wrestling' in Lucha Libre masks for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, Smithsonian: Journeys, Legal Affairs Magazine, and The Believer. More academically, I have written essays for the The American Historical Review, Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, and the William and Mary Quarterly, and book reviews for a number of other publications. In the editorial realm, I was the first editor-in-chief of The Appendix: A New Journal of Narrative and Experimental History, which I co-founded in 2012. A collection of my Appendix writing, and some of the other writers’ pieces I helped edit for the journal, is here. I also co-founded and co-edited Backlist, a digital platform that shares historians' recommended reading lists for the subjects they love. As a writer, I am represented by my literary agent Dan Conaway of Writers House.
I am available for public lectures and comment, weighing in on the history of Machu Picchu and Andean ancestors for the media, such as NPR. I have delivered invited lectures at Peru’s National Library, the National Geographic Society, Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute, and other institutions. I have presented and written on Peru's cultural patrimony strategy to the Cultural Property Advisory Committee at the U.S. State Department. I regularly field inquiries from American individuals seeking to understand or return Andean human remains in their possession.
* Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities