About Me
Childhood
I am a native Californian, born and raised in Silicon Valley. Despite growing up in suburbia I feel a strong connection to the place where I grew up. I attended high school down the street from the hospital I was born in, and my family lived in the same home for most of my childhood.
I also feel strong attachments to the places where my extended family lives: south Alabama and southern California. It was always a special experience when I was growing up to visit each place and see my relatives.
My parents and family have always been incredibly supportive of me and my goals. In addition I've been fortunate enough to have teachers at every stage of my education who have taken extra time to mentor me in particular subjects.
Junior High School
Beginning in junior high school I became involved in the production of my school's yearbook and newspaper. I served as editor-in-chief of both in eighth grade and the yearbook was honored with an award by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. The school's yearbook adviser, who mentored me, was given an award by the group upon her retirement in 1999.
Working on the publications gave me an immense amount of experience and training using computers and desktop publishing software. I learned the PageMaker program before it was an Adobe product, when it was produced by Aldus. This was one of the important beginnings of my experience with and interest in computers, especially Apple Macintosh computers in particular.
St. Francis High School
I entered high school expecting to continue these activities. I worked on the school's publications my first two years, but gave them up by my junior year because the faculty advisers were as uninspirational and demoralizing as my junior high teachers had been dynamic and nurturing.
Freshman year of high school I enrolled in a speech and debate class as an elective and thoroughly enjoyed it. My high school had a very small debate team but an incredibly dedicated and enthusiastic coach. His guidance and teaching helped me to become very successful in competitions by my junior year. I went to the state and national tournaments in multiple events both my junior and senior years. I won multiple awards at those tournaments as well as at invitationals sponsored by schools around the country.
UC Berkeley, Undergraduate
When I began my undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1999 I still enjoyed speech and debate but I was not interested in competing with the university's club. Instead I served as an assistant coach at my old high school which was incredibly rewarding.
I knew when I started college that I was interested in history and politics, so I planned on a history or political science major. The Berkeley history classes, even the introductory undergraduate ones, were captivating and the faculty were not only knowledgeable, engaging lecturers but they were also kind and supportive of me and their other students. I was hooked.
I took History 5 (European Civilization 1500-present) during the spring semester of 2000 with Professor Thomas Laqueur. Two years later I took his History 151B (Britain 1660-1850). Professor Laqueur's perspective on European and British history was incredibly revealatory because of his emphasis on social and cultural factors.
Ultimately I completed quite a few more history classes at Berkeley than the minimum required to graduate. Among them were History 151C (Britain 1850-present) with Professor James Vernon and History 153 (British Empire) with Professor Thomas Metcalf. Their excellent teaching, combined with my own interests, cemeted my specific intellectual concern with modern Britain and the British Empire.
My senior thesis, which I completed in the Spring of 2004, related the case of James Buckingham, an English newspaper editor who was expelled from India by the East India Company in 1824. His case became something of a cause célèbre in Britain. It was investigated by a Parliamentary Select Committee, which heard evidence of the autocratic nature of Company rule in India and eventually voted Buckingham a life pension as compensation for his expulsion. My argument was that Buckingham's experience shows how controversies took on different meanings in the metropole when they were transmitted there from the colony.
UC Berkeley, Graduate
My experience with my undergraduate senior thesis led me to apply to graduate school with the intent to pursue a dissertation or research project on newspapers and the press in the British Empire. Although I applied to several schools, Berkeley was my first choice because part of my reason for pursuing graduate studies instead of law school or working was because of the guidance and inspiration I received from Professors Laqueur, Vernon, Metcalf, and Hesse.
During the fall semester 2005, my first semester in the graduate program, I took courses from Professors Laqueur and Vernon. One was a research paper writing class, History 285C, with a thematic topic of histories of death and of the dead among the living. Researching and writing my paper for this course led me to become interested in British cemeteries around the world.
My paper focused on British military cemeteries around the world during the twentieth century. Specifically, I analyzed the way that the British attempt to care for the First World War dead led to the creation of an unprecedented international system for managing the dead and commemorating them. I traced the expanding scope of treaties that covered burials of the war dead. These agreements gave permanent ownership of cemetery land to the British as well as specified that individual soldiers' bodies could not be repatriated for burial at home.
I completed another research paper on a related topic during the spring 2007 semester. I wrote about British civilian cemeteries in Burma, China, and Iran during the 1950s. I examined what happened to these locations at the "end of empire," when the British Foreign Office lacked the money, power, and prestige to preserve them yet simultaneously found it anathema to consider abadoning them entirely. Overseas civilian cemeteries took on a more significant role and commanded more bureaucratic attention as British power receeded around the world than they had during the height of the British Empire.
I have yet to formulate an "official" dissertation prospectus, but my intent is to continue my study of British cemeteries around the world. I would like to combine a study of civilian ones with military ones as well as potentially pushing backwards to examine early ones dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
