Bio
I’m an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and the Peace & Conflict Studies Program at Colgate University in upstate New York. Before academia, I worked in journalism, covering Latin American affairs and U.S. policy toward the region. Although I'm now focused full-time on teaching and research, I continue doing journalism on the side as a way of sharing my research with broader audiences.
I am currently working on a book about the political and economic forces shaping the region of Central New York. It's about the struggles facing the region and about how local communities are responding to those challenges. My first book, The Frontier Effect: State Formation and Violence in Colombia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2020. It challenges the notion that the cause of violence in Colombia’s war-torn rural areas is the absence of the state. The country’s violent frontier zones are not simple cases of Hobbesian political disorder; they are spaces in which new regimes of accumulation and rule are being produced and contested.
Before academia, I spent five years as an editor of the most widely read English-language publication on Latin America: the NACLA Report on the Americas, published by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in New York City. My journalistic work has been published in magazines and newspapers across the United States (New York Times, Miami Herald, The Nation, among others).
My academic research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Antipode, Geoforum, Geographical Review, Journal of Agrarian Change, Journal of Latin American Studies, and Environment and Planning D: Society & Space as well as presented at various conferences and workshops in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
I can be reached by email.
Download (PDF): Academic CV (last updated June 2022).