Books
Engineered Paradise: Cultural Power and the Making of the Caribbean Cruise Industry
University of Illinois Press (Forthcoming – 2027)
This book takes you aboard the modern cruise ship to reveal a carefully engineered world where culture itself becomes a product. It uncovers how mass-market cruising transformed global difference into themed experiences designed for consumption. Tracing the rise of major cruise lines from the 1960s to the present, the book shows how these floating resorts grew into powerful systems of cultural mediation, shaping how millions of American travelers imagined the Caribbean and the wider world.
Journal Articles
Reimagining a Tropical Paradise: The Circulation of Imperial Ideologies in Early-Twentieth-Century Caribbean Cruise Guidebooks
Journal of Tourism History (2025)
United Fruit Company, “There the Pirates Hid Their Gold,” 1915, https://archive.org/details/UnitedFruitCompanySteamshipService1915A.
This article explores how early-twentieth-century cruise guidebooks shaped perceptions of the Caribbean through imperial ideologies. Focusing on writers Harry L. Foster and Eleanor Early, it examines how their guides depicted the region as distinct from the tropics promoted by companies like the United Fruit Company. While Foster and Early encouraged tourists to look beyond stereotypes, their narratives ultimately reinforced colonial ideas, presenting the Caribbean as a leisure destination for the growing US market.
Cultural Globalization at Sea: The Rise of the Modern Caribbean Cruise Industry
Globalizations (2024)
Mass-market cruise lines like Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian rose in the late 1960s and 1970s, targeting middle-class Americans drawn to cultural tourism. From the late 1970s, they promoted Eurocentric representations of Caribbean societies, often flattening cultural diversity. Onboard themes reimagined global cultures for passenger comfort, reducing cultural complexity. As agents of globalization, these companies turned cruise ships and ports into controlled “metaspaces,” reinforcing their economic and political power while erasing cultural difference.
Virtual Empire: Performing Colonialism in the MMORPG Runescape
Games and Culture (2023)
This article explores how in-game advancement in the MMORPG Runescape reflects virtual performances of colonial exploitation. Through four case studies—exploitative archaeology, colonial cartography, imperial diplomacy, and resource extraction—it examines how players engage in empire-building mechanics to progress. In connecting the advancement of user accounts to performances of empire, it is argued that Runescape reproduces historic colonial projects in which European powers commodified non-European societies to advance their own economic and cultural agendas.
The World on a Ship: Producing Cosmopolitan Dining on Mass-Market Cruises
Food, Culture & Society (2019)
This article examines how mass-market cruise lines use food, labor, and built environments to create culinary experiences marketed as cosmopolitan. Rather than offering full immersion in any single culture, these companies blend multiple international dining themes onboard to appeal to passengers seeking global experiences. In studying how mass-market cruise lines as mobile spaces of containment combine both international and localized dining experiences to offer the “world on a ship,” scholars of tourism can better understand how travel companies produce conceptions of cosmopolitanism at destinations.
The Culinary Gender Binary in an Era of Multiculturalism: Foodwork in Toronto’s Late Postwar Italian Immigrant Community
Journal of Family History (2018)
This article uses oral histories to examine how the migration process affected foodwork carried out by late post-war Italian immigrants in Toronto. Culinary gender roles remained preserved as narrators journeyed to Toronto. However, by the twenty-first century when national discourse emphasized a multicultural Canada—the climax of the shift toward culinary pluralism—the narrators each embodied a range of food masculinities and femininities. Their experiences reveal motivations for culinary labor beyond binary gender norms, pointing to the need for a new framework that reflects how migration and multiculturalism reshape food and identity.
Mediating Cultural Encounters at Sea: Dining in the Modern Cruise Industry
Journal of Tourism History (2017)
Before the 1970s, cruises catered mainly to elites, but the rise of a middle-class market brought dramatic changes—including revamped menus to suit new tastes. Modern mass-market cruise lines began offering cuisines marketed as exotic” using food to mediate passenger encounters with cultural Others. Marketing shaped whether dishes were seen as familiar or foreign, reflecting how companies wanted passengers to view racial and cultural difference. Today, cruise ships feature ethnically themed dining and immersive culinary spaces aboard constantly mobile platforms. This unique model encourages rapid, curated cultural immersion through food, revealing how cruise lines commodify global cultures for consumption.
Dissertation
The World on a Ship: Simulating Cultural Encounters in the US-Caribbean Mass-Market Cruise Industry, 1966 – Present
Link to Dissertation
This dissertation explores the rise of mass-market cruise lines like Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian in the 1960s-70s, analyzing how they marketed cultural and geographic theming to an expanding American middle class in the coming decades. It argues that these companies used simulated global cultural experiences to attract passengers while appropriating spending from local Caribbean economies.
Select Awards:
Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2019)
Alvin Achenbaum Grant, Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, Duke University (2019)
Gaston Héon Graduate Scholarship, University of Ottawa (2019)
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation Research Grant (2018)