I am an author, speaker, historian, and monster consultant (considering inquiries regarding TV, film, and podcasts). My first book was the multi-award-winning Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

HUMANS: A Monstrous History, my next book, was acquired by the University of California Press as a lead trade-list title, in a pre-empt. The book is a transregional history of monsters and monster-making, revealing how we have categorized beings in and beyond the world, perceived otherness, and sought to control those who challenged a given social order, showing how today’s troubling divisions and urgent questions about nature, society, and technology are built on age-old anxieties, now called by other names. I am represented by Roz Foster, a literary agent with the Frances Goldin Literary Agency in New York City.

For updates on HUMANS, among other things, please sign up for Notes from an Everything Historian, a free newsletter about history, culture, books, art, food, and monsters.

The focus of my academic work has been cultural encounters in the Americas; spatial thinking (descriptive cartography and geography); categories of beings & things (in, e.g., cabinets of curiosities); environmental thought; and what the category of ‘monster’ and practices of monster-making can tell us about humanity.

Much of my academic research has been on the period 1400-1800 but, where monster-making is concerned, I stretch from antiquity to the present.

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Adventurer in the Deep Humanities

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Giants at southern latitudes

De Jode's giants

Gerard de Jode, map of America (Antwerp, 1576), detail of giants in Patagonia. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, G5200 1569 .M2 Vault.

Trading encounters

Vallard Atlas, 1547 map 12, detail from northeastern Brazil. The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, HM 29. This vignette depicts Tupi people bartering with Norman traders.

Urban life in indigenous America

Mexico and Cuzco

Georg Braun and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates orbis terrarum, 3 vols. (1572-1617), I, f. 58v–59r, view of Cuzco; view of Tenochtitlán. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, J575 B825c / 2-SIZE.