This project maps out the contours of the idea of “natural” diets in the Western medical tradition with a focus on the last few centuries. It begins in earnest around the early nineteenth-century as religious and health reformers responded to the emergence of new convenience and packaged foods. Perhaps because the ideas of natural foods and diets have become so ubiquitous, their long and complex history has been overlooked. Yet the idea of a natural diet and debates have shifted over time provides a revealing lens onto popular relationships between nature, technology, and modernity. Even amidst massive cultural change over the last century, the way appeals to natural food have been formulated, contested, and appropriated provides much needed perspective on contemporary (but often ahistorical and reductive) debates about the meaning and implications of natural food, its place in our food system, and ways it continues to shape food production and consumption.
Our mission at UNM’s Digital Heritage Studio is to harness innovative digital technologies and digital design to illuminate the rich history of New Mexico. We empower scholars, educators, and communities to create immersive, interactive archives and storytelling experiences that invite critical engagement with core humanities issues. Through collaborative projects, open-access resources, and experimental digital platforms, we aim to bridge academic research with public discourse, fostering a deeper, more inclusive understanding of the human condition.
We envision a future where humanities scholarship is at the heart of digital transformation, making it accessible, dynamic, and globally resonant. Our studio strives to be a pioneering hub where humanistic inquiry, technology, and design converge—cultivating an environment that not only preserves but also re-imagines the narratives that define our shared heritage. By breaking down traditional barriers to knowledge and sparking interdisciplinary conversations, we aspire foreground the stories that shape our world
Many of my classes now create or contribute to some kind of collaborative digital public history project. Honestly, I like working with students to build things a lot more than just sifting through Word docs. Students indicate that they enjoy it, work harder, and learn more. Each class makes new contributions, and over time that work adds up to digital history projects that would be nearly impossible to do otherwise.
With an emphasis on simplicity, sustainability, and thorough documentation, this project seeks to develop and maintain a jumping off point for public digital history projects with GitHub and GitHub Pages. My aim is to provide a middle ground between no-tech platforms like Wordpress that sacrifice too much editorial control and custom hand-coded websites that are too difficult to maintain.
You can check out the latest version of Xanthan in my repository and use it as a template for a new project. A brief set of slides provides more motivation and detail.
When walking around campus, it’s easy to accept that the space around us just is, or is as it should be. But the history of the campus tells a different story. Reflecting on the history of the space around us helps us to become more attune to the power of spatial relationships and to become more conscious consumers and shapers of the environments we inhabit. See our research from the Center for Southwest Research at our UNM Campus History website.
Despite the importance of historiography to anyone interested in history, it’s frequently mired in abstract theoretical, philosophical, and methodological jargon. This project showcases the collaborative essays produced by an advanced undergraduate historiography course at the University of New Mexico. The essays collected here take both a chronological and thematic approach to highlighting important continuities and and ruptures in the way people have conceived and produced historical interpretations of the western world.
Our collectively written and edited Intro Guide to Historiography is building over time an accessible and welcoming guide for new undergraduates to understand the basics and importance of historiography for not only history itself, but also more critical civil engagement.
Working with the National Historic Trails Intermountain Region (NTIR) Office, UNM history graduate student Guy McClellan and I organized an multidisciplinary research practicum course (the syllabus is archived here) that provided an introduction to the study, interpretation, and significance of the National Historic Trails System, as well as engaged students as core contributors to ongoing research projects at the NTIR office. As preparation for research projects, students read about trail historiography, overland migration, gender dynamics on the trail, interactions with native communities, international commerce, and borderlands. The strong public history facet of the course encouraged students to grapple with key questions about historic trails and national memory: How does a historic trail retain cultural significance? What are the challenges and strategies in communicating about the trails to a 21st-century audience?
Our work came to life on a website on the National Historic Sites on the Santa Fe Trail.
This project was an experiment to see if a small academic workshop (on speculative futures in the history of science) could produce and make available a collection of scholarly work in an open access web format that would remain more visible an active than the results (and papers) from a typical academic workshop.
I was responsible for designing and building the website, as well as migrating content to a sustainable web format and publishing the essays online. The project is still ongoing, but the project team was pulled in too many different directions b various other obligations, which has unfortunately dissipated energy from this project. But we are proud of what we produced as an experiment for making the work of a one-off workshop openly visible and available for specialists and non-specialists alike.
Our work lives on at histscifi.com.