I am a postdoctoral associate in the Department of History at Cornell University. I received my PhD from Stanford University in Modern Thought and Literature and specialize in the history and culture of American food, popular culture, and health. My first book, Diet and the Disease of Civilization, was published January 2018 with Rutgers University Press. The first full-length study of diet books, Diet and the Disease of Civilization reveals how 20th century dieting systems have articulated a powerful response to anxieties about the psychic and physical costs of modernity, crafting new stories positioning civilization itself as a disease and diet as the cure. Following an imaginary chronology of human origins, the book examines Paleolithic diets, biblical diets, precolonial diets, and environmentalist detoxification programs.