About

I’m an assistant professor of history and American studies at the University of Virginia. (Click here for my faculty webpage.)

I study capitalism, the environment, and science and technology. My current research examines corruption and monopoly in the American sugar empire of the late nineteenth century, showing how the political economy of the United States was shaped by struggles over labor and nature in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawai’i.

I earned my PhD in 2014 from MIT’s program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), supervised by Professor David Kaiser.

My dissertation, “Inventing Purity in the Atlantic Sugar World, 1860-1930,” won the Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation from the Business History Conference in the US, and the Coleman Prize for Best Dissertation from the Association of Business Historians in the UK. The research for my dissertation was supported by fellowships from the National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, Chemical Heritage Foundation, among many others.

From September 2015 to June 2016 I was a research associate at Harvard Business School, working with Professor Eugene Soltes. Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, as part of their project on “Networks of Exchange: Mobilities of Knowledge in a Globalized World.” I’ve also been a lecturer at MIT and at the University of Pennsylvania.

I live in Charlottesville, VA.

You can email me at ds2ax@virginia.edu.

You can find me on Twitter (rarely these days) @singsingsolo.