My own work focuses on maritime environments, food and maritime labour in the 15th-16th century Atlantic basin. I am currently working on my first book, currently titled Terra Nova: Food, Water and Work in an Early Atlantic World. It is a history of the northwest Atlantic in the sixteenth century, exploring the Atlantic origins of the commercial cod fisheries and a permanent European presence in the region. I also research and write more broadly about islands and food in the early Atlantic, early Canada, and premodern global foodways. These are all topics I was tentatively interested in when I started my project at Pitt, but which have grown into subjects I am passionate about and committed to researching and teaching.
I am fortunate enough to currently have a job which directly applies my PhD training, but even so I’ve noticed that a few things specific to the history program at Pitt have really shaped my post-PhD teaching and research. Coming out of six years at Pitt I took it for granted that we need to approach the past in a transnational/transregional perspective – something which is not universally held to be true, as I’ve learned to my chagrin, but which has really impacted how I approached my work at the Folger and Rutgers. The experience of completing my PhD within a strong Atlantic history cohort gave me a determination to teach and research the past from maritime perspectives, and taught me the value of forming close scholarly communities. Likewise, the program’s emphasis on history-from-below and labour history has very much shaped how I write about the early Atlantic, and how I teach premodern environmental histories. I am also realizing that having the opportunity to work with the World History Center during my time at Pitt was a turning point for me. My teaching has been pretty fundamentally shaped by what I learned working with world historians, and my research on food history has emphasized a global perspective because of their guidance. These are all things which are, I think, unique to the experience in our department, and which make me more than a little proud to be able to say that I got my degree from Pitt.