History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals.
James Baldwin
My Mission
I am drawn to Baldwin's quote not only because it captures the essence of why historians "do what we do," but it also speaks to my goals as a historian of the present and my ethos as an educator.
As a researcher, writer, and educator, I see it as my responsibility to show my audience how every aspect of our present lives, up until this very minute, has been a product of intersecting and dynamic historical forces.
Baldwin's quote also speaks to my personal goal to always reflect on my positionality. As a white, middle-class woman, I have a responsibility to acknowledge how my unearned privilege is a result of white supreamcy, colonization, genocide, and racial violence. If I and others refuse to acknowledge the histories of our privilege and challenge these ideologies, we only perpetuate their harm.
My Research
My primary fields of study are Critical Whiteness Studies (from Critical Race Studies), American political history, women's political history, and the American right wing of the 20th and 21st centuries.
My dissertation, “The Not-So-Dark Web: The Digital Development and Danger of the Right Wing’s White Womanhood,” analyzes the history of the American right wing’s white supremacist ideologies in internet spaces and subsequent racial violence. It chronicles how white, right-wing women content creators from the 1990s to 2026 performed and perfected “whiteness” as a powerful and palatable form of white supremacy on mainstream sites.
In my master's and undergraduate work, I have also written about the gender dynamics of Southern Californian neo-Nazi groups from teh 1960s to the 1990s, the history of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in post-War Orange County, and right-wing backlash to Progressive education initiatives in the 1960s.
In all of my research projects, I aim to understand how white supremacist, right-wing, and even extreme right ideologies become normalized into American culture and society.
White supremacy is not the shark, it is the water.
Guante