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Humanities Division
History Department
Associate Professor
Faculty
Regular Faculty
History of Science
Colonialism
Digital Humanities
Drug Policy
World History
Stevenson College Academic Building
279
Via Zoom: Tuesdays from 3:30 to 4:30 pm. Please email to set up Zoom meeting.
History Department
Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, May 2015.
I am an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz interested in the history of globalization, science, drugs, and the long-term impacts of technological change. My book The Age of Intoxication (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) explores how drug users and sellers in the British and Portuguese empires helped to shape imperialism, global trade, and scientific practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Trained as a historian of the early modern era, I am currently working on two book projects (one on experimental science in the early Cold War, another on the entanglements between colonialism, technology, and magic between 1650 and 1950).
Early modern world history; history of science, medicine, and technology; Spanish and Portuguese empires; history of drugs and poisons; history of globalization; history and anthropology of magic in a cross-cultural context.
- Early modern science, medicine, and technology
- History of the Iberian peninsula and of the Spanish and Portuguese empires
- History of drugs and poisons
- Travel writing of the 17th and 18th centuries
- History of magic
Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia University 2015-2016
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography, 2014-16
Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2014-15
Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2013-14
Fulbright fellowship to Portugal, 2011-2012
Book:
The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
Journal articles and book chapters:
“The Flip Side of the Pharmacopoeia: Poisons in the Atlantic World,” in Matthew Crawford and Joseph Gabriel, eds., Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
“Semedo’s Sixteen Secrets: Tracing Pharmacological Networks in the Portuguese Tropics,” in Paula Findlen, ed. Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018).
“Drugs and Early Modernity,” History Compass, Vol. 15, No. 4 (April, 2017).
Selected popular writing:
“Palm Trees and Potions: On Portuguese Pharmacy Signs,” The Recipes Project, July, 2016.
"Into the Mystic," Aeon Magazine, 2015.
“Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia,” in The Public Domain Review, 2014.
"The King of the Islands of Refreshment" in The Appendix, 2014.
"The Literature of Laughing Gas," in The Paris Review, 2014.
"The Pre-Modern History of Outer Space," in The Atlantic, 2013.
Milton, Piper (pmilton)
HIS 70A (Winter, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021)
HIS 196F (Fall, 2020)
HIS 100 (Spring, 2020)
HIS 2A (Spring, 2018)
HIS 177A (Spring, 2018)
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