My newest book Grounds for Exclusion: Race, Health, and Disability in Argentina, 1876-1932 (UNC Press, 2026) challenges scholars and Argentine society to rethink one of the most dominant and incorrect parts of historical writing and popular memory. Between 1876 and 1932, Argentina excluded with open doors. Over these six decades, state officials developed a long list of grounds for exclusion, which were all reasons that deterred people from ever boarding a ship and that led to the denial of entry to many who tried to come. The widespread inclusion of millions of immigrants in Argentine society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was predicated on the exclusion of others on the basis of race, health, and disability. Early parts of this research have appeared in the Hispanic American Historical Review and Journal of Migration History.

My current research follows grapes, wine, and cognac through a set of global case studies. In Argentina, I examine the rapid expansion of wine production in Mendoza and San Juan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, paying attention to the growing system of water management and to how producers chose between grapes, alfalfa, and fruit. This work builds on an earlier study of wine in British Columbia (Agricultural History, 2025). A related, SSHRC-funded project uses archives in France, Canada, the United States, and Argentina to show how cognac producers built markets through networks of agents, newspaper advertising, and claims about cognac’s curative properties, in part to fend off temperance and Prohibition movements in North America and competition from Argentine producers and Italian and Spanish importers in Argentina. Together, these projects explore how commodities, consumers, and migrants moved across the Atlantic together.

My two earlier monographs examine German speakers in the Americas. The Boundaries of Ethnicity: German Immigration and the Language of Belonging in Ontario (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022) considers what it meant to be German in Ontario between 1880 and 1930 and uncovers some of the origins of Canadian multiculturalism. To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society (Stanford University Press, 2018), also published in Spanish as Ser de Buenos Aires (Editorial Biblos, 2019), examines the German speakers who sought to create a lasting community in Buenos Aires and those who challenged that project.

I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon. At age 17, I spent a year living in Tucumán, Argentina, an experience that set me on the path to Latin American history. I return to Argentina almost every year, ideally in December, to conduct research in Buenos Aires and Mendoza, and in 2024 I had the opportunity to teach a graduate seminar at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán.

Check out the CV and the Research tab to learn more about my projects.