My research and teaching focus on Latin America and the Caribbean with an emphasis on histories of the environment, infrastructure, race and ethnicity, and social movements.
My first book, Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022) is a history of social struggle over water access and hydraulic engineering in Bolivia from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first. It concentrates on the Cochabamba Valley, the site of intense conflict over water tenure, hydraulic infrastructure, and attempts to reform both over this period, especially after Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Through analysis of a wide variety of sources, from agrarian reform case records to engineering studies to oral historical interviews and ethnographic observation, the book explores a century-long process of water dispossession, recovery, and redistribution, providing a new vantage point on Indigenous community closure, national revolution, and the water wars of the early 2000s. Water for All received the Latin American Studies Association Environmental Section 2022 Book Award (First Prize) and an honorable mention for the American Society of Ethnohistory’s Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award in 2023.
Research for Water for All was funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Inter-American Foundation, the UC Berkeley Institute for International Studies, the Barnard College Alumnae Association, the University of Oklahoma’s College of Arts and Sciences, and the University of Oklahoma Research Council. The book evolved out of my 2015 dissertation, “Dividing the Waters: How Power, Property and Protest Transformed the Waterscape of Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1879–2000,” which won the UC Berkeley History Department Dissertation Prize and the New England Council of Latin American Studies Dissertation Prize.
I am currently conducting research for a new book, tentatively titled “Glacier Fathers and Mother Earth: Climate Change in the Bolivian Andes,” The book will chronicle how Aymara Indigenous people and other groups have related to a changing mountainous environment as the climate has warmed and glaciers have receded from the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This research has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the University of Oklahoma.
Before graduate school, I taught social studies at Taft High School in the Bronx, NY, and conducted research in Bolivia as a Fulbright scholar. I lived in Bolivia again for five years while researching and writing my dissertation. Before joining the faculty at OU, I taught at Smith College and the University of Maine at Machias.
Selected Publications
Books:
Agua para todos: Revolución, Propiedad y Comunidad en la Bolivia moderna. La Paz, Bolivia: Plural Editores, 2024.
Water for All: Revolution, Property, and Community in Modern Bolivia. Oakland: University of California Press, 2022.
Articles:
“Cochabamba's 2000 Water War in Historical Perspective.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Oxford University Press, 2014– (published February 2023). https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.1108
“Revolutions and Counter-Revolutions in Bolivia, Past and Present.” Online Forum on Contemporary Bolivia and History, Hispanic American Historical Review, Dec. 2019. https://hahr-online.com/forum-contemporary-bolivia-and-history-hines/
“The Power and Ethics of Vernacular Modernism: The Misicuni Dam Project in Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1944–2016.” Hispanic American Historical Review 98.2 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-4376680
Book Chapters:
“Dispossession and Redistribution: Social Struggle over Water in Bolivian History.” In The Struggle for Natural Resources: Findings from Bolivian History. Edited by Rossana Barragán and Carmen Soliz. University of New Mexico Press, 2024. https://www.unmpress.com/9780826366177/the-struggle-for-natural-resources/
Blog Posts:
“Water for All: Community, Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia.” Inhabiting the Anthropocene, Feb. 2023. https://inhabitingtheanthropocene.com/2023/02/08/water-for-all-community-property-and-revolution-in-modern-bolivia/
