Graduate advising
At UC Santa Cruz, I am currently accepting prospective PhD students who are interested in topics such as the history of the Atlantic world, the history of science and technology, the cultural, intellectual or social history of the Portuguese or British empires, or the global history of medicine, drugs, and pharmacology.
If you are interested in applying for UCSC’s PhD program in history, please feel free to contact me.
Syllabi
Below you can download syllabi for selected classes I teach at UCSC.
Spring, 2023: History 65B, “Late Medieval Europe”
Winter, 2020: History 70A “Modern European History, 1500-1815”
Fall, 2019: History 196F, “Imperial Ecology”
Fall, 2018: History 177A, “Tropics of Empire”
Generative AI in education
Since 2019 I’ve been experimenting with AI language models (LLMs) as tools for research, creative expression, and in particular historical simulation exercises. The issues with LLMs are well-documented, but I also think that their potential in humanistic education is potentially profound and just beginning to be explored.
I’ve collected some of my writings on this topic here, and a guide to the HistoryLens framework for integrating LLM-based simulations as in-class activities in history classes can be found here.