I am at work on several projects.
My first book, Psychedelic Alchemy: The Amazonian Origins of the Global Science and Medicine of Hallucinogens, explores how scientists transformed ayahuasca from a vital regional Amazonian subject into an object of global Western medicine and science, highlighting how Native and folk practitioners and ayahuasca itself contested, facilitated, and restricted this transformation. By tracing this history from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day across the Amazonian regions of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, my work reveals the limitations of the "psychedelic" as a universal category of knowledge as well as the biomedical sciences that underpin its foundation. This project has received generous support from the American Philosophical Society, the Science History Institute, the National Science Foundation (US), the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, and the University of Pennsylvania.
With Claire Edington (UCSD) and Gabrielle Robbins (Oxford), I am currently co-editing a special issue titled "Worlding Drugs." This volume presents a capacious understanding of "drugs" that reflects lived experiences and entanglements across various lifeways, multiple geographies, and intersecting histories. It proposes that we expand how we conceptualize "drugs" and their histories to allow for the emergence of new historical methods, narratives, and questions. Through assembling these contributors in this special issue, we hope to build a community of scholars engaged in these questions and continue the conversation with author workshops, conference roundtables, and other forms of mutual engagement and support.
Along with my work in the history of medicine, science, and environment, I am interested in the digital humanities. I am currently the Associate Editor for the History of Science in Latin American and the Caribbean (HOSLAC), an open-source collection of more than 200 annotated primary sources.