My current work deals with the historical connections between science, food, and politics. Mixing approaches from history of science, history of technology and environmental history, I follow the transnational circulation of Californian oranges from and into Brazil, Palestine, Algeria and South Africa. I am interested in what travels attached to Californian technoscientific oranges such as cloning practices, viruses, growers’ cooperatives and racialized labor relations. In my new book manuscript, “Cloning Democracy”, I tinker intensively with oranges in order to assert the importance of California in the remaking of the Global South in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

I have been an assistant professor in the Department of History at Drexel University since the fall of 2012. Prior to that I was a research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS) of the University of Lisbon for seven years and a visiting professor at UCLA (2007/2008 and 2011) and UC Berkeley (2011/2012). I lectured several graduate and undergraduate courses in history of science, history of technology, environmental history, global history and history of fascism. My special topics courses include history of commodities and theories in science and technology studies (STS).