I am a historian, writer, and editor.
As a historian, I write primarily about the Cold War in Latin America. In general, my research interests include the politics of culture and propaganda, socialism and democracy, and poverty and inequality. I am the author of Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America, which was published by Harvard University Press in October 2015 and won the 2017 Luciano Tomassini book prize from the Latin American Studies Association. A forthcoming book, which will be published in 2026, explores the role of the Ford Foundation in the development of the social sciences.
I currently teach in the History Department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I have previously served as Associate Chair of the department, and as of fall 2025 will be the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Previously, I was a professor of the U.S. and the World at the University of Texas at El Paso, taught in the political economy program and history department at Berkeley, and was an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University. I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2011, graduating with distinction. Before that, I taught high school in California and Texas.
Beyond my academic work, I am a writer and editor. I am currently co-editor of Dissent magazine, the oldest social-democratic publication in the United States. I am also a contributing editor at the New Republic, where I regularly contribute book reviews. In addition to those publications, I have written for The New York Times, The Nation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Baffler, among other places. In Spanish, I write regularly for Nueva Sociedad about U.S. politics, and have also written for Letras Libres, Nexos, and Horizontal.
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