Research

How did Nahua ("Aztec") education survive the traumatic disruptions of the Spanish invasion? My first monograph, An Unholy Pedagogy: Visions of Learning from Mesoamerica, 1300 to 1650 (Cambridge University Press, 2026), rethinks education studies by centering Indigenous visions of learning. I track education systems before the Spanish-Catholic invasion, examining the writings, art, and architecture of Nahua communities. By analysing Nahuatl primary sources and historical art and archaeological evidence, I reveal how Nahua students transformed pedagogy, shaped learning, and preserved local knowledge in the first schools of the Americas.

I investigate how Mesoamerican cultures are represented in video games, board games, and digital media, interrogating the colonial affordances embedded in popular digital experiences. My article "As the Digital Teocalli Burns" examines how gamified representations of Mesoamerica displace sacred spaces and reproduce colonial narratives. I co-created the "Re-Imagining Coyote" augmented reality exhibition at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, which traveled internationally to Tijuana and San Diego. A second monograph, Ready Conquistador 1: Digital Colonial Game vs. Mesoamerican Heritage, is in progress.

I am leading the first comprehensive study of a sixteenth-century Nahuatl-Latin lectionary in the British and Foreign Bible Society's collection at the Cambridge University Library (BFBS MS 375). This work, conducted through the Hidden in Plain Sight Project with Queen Mary University of London, investigates "Aztec Tipp-Ex": Indigenous technologies used akin to modern liquid paper, recovering erased artwork and Mesoamerican glyphs in colonial manuscripts. In collaboration with the AI Research for Cultural Heritage Hub (ArCH) at Cambridge's ai@cam initiative, I use computer vision and machine learning to detect and analyse material interventions across a growing corpus of Indigenous-colonial texts.