I am an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern science and medicine. My research agenda is centered on bodily potential and its history, including especially attempts to modify capacities inherent in living beings, particularly human and nonhuman animals.

My first monograph, The Perfection of Nature, tells the history of Renaissance animal and human breeding projects that were imagined, articulated, and partially enacted. My edited volume Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds was co-edited by Anna Toledano and Duygu Yildirim, and developed in partnership with designers and artists. In it, I explore how medicaments extracted from nature could transfer bodily potential from one being to another. The working group book Knowing an Empire: Early Modern Chinese and Spanish Worlds in Dialogue, co-edited with Huiyi Wu, pioneers a new method for global history based on the juxtaposition of local sources in China and the Spanish Empire. In it, I explore how local environments influenced the corporeality of their residents, botanical, animal, and human.

Currently, my research focuses on the history of bioprospecting, natural product extraction, and the early modern creation of the pharmaceutical industry. This builds on a growing set of machine-readable lists of substances with medical effects — Historical Pharmacopeias.

I am an Associate Professor at Hamilton College and Director of Latin American & Latine Studies. I received my doctorate from Stanford University in 2018 and then returned to Central New York to my alma mater Cornell University as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in 2018. My work has been supported by Villa I Tatti - the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Foundation, among others. In Summer 2025, I will be taking up a CAORC-NEH research fellowship in Mexico.