Associate Professor, Modern Latin American History, Department of History, the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), 2024-
William J. and Charlotte K. Duddy University Endowed Fellow, 2025-2026, Penn State
College of the Liberal Arts Endowed Fellow, 2024-2025, Penn State
Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Department of History, Penn State, 2023-2025
Editorial Advisory Board, Ñawpa Pacha, journal of Institute of Andean Studies, 2023-
Assistant Professor, Modern Latin American History, Department of History, Penn State, 2016-2024
Researcher, LAGLOBAL History and Anthropology Working Group, 2016-2020
Barra Postdoctoral Fellow, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2016-2018.
Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, The Appendix, 2012-2014.

I am an ethnohistorian of science in Latin America, whose two books explore the encounter of the Inca Empire and Andean deathways with the collecting practices of Peru, the Americas, and the world. Before joining the Pennsylvania State University (University Park), I was a Barra Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. My research has used museum archives and ethnohistorical sources to engage three questions: (1) how did Andean states, intellectuals, and campesinos meet U.S. museums and researchers in the work of exposing Andean ancestors and others, shaping modern identities and cultural patrimony laws? (2) how was that work conditioned by the imperial encounter of Inca and Andean mortuary politics and Spanish science, violence, and religion? (3) how can museums use their archives to re-connect Andean descendants and communities to their collected antecessors? To answer the latter question, since 2019 I’ve coordinated the Huayo Project, a collaboration of U.S., Peruvian, and Italian anthropologists, archaeologists, and curators committed to working with the residents of the Peruvian province of Huarochirí to document the museum presence of human remains and ancestral beings extracted their lands. I am also a practiced communicator on matters of cultural heritage, the Andean history of science, and the legacy of Americanist archaeology, submitting position papers in support of the renewal of the U.S.-Peruvian Memorandum of Understanding Under the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act, as well as publishing in my field’s top academic journals and popular outlets such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.

Empires of the Dead: Inca Mummies and the Peruvian Ancestors of American Anthropology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/empires-of-the-dead-9780197542552

• Winner, Bolton-Johnson Prize, the best book in English on Latin American History published in 2023 from the Conference on Latin American History.

Cradle of Gold: The Story of Hiram Bingham, a Real-Life Indiana Jones, and the Search for Machu Picchu (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230112049/cradleofgold/

• 2011 paperback edition with new afterword to reflect the fall 2010 return of Machu Picchu’s artifacts from Yale to Peru, whose legal foundation Cradle of Gold (published in April 2010) documented and promoted.
• Revised, translated into Spanish as Las tumbas de Machu Picchu: La historia de Hiram Bingham y la busqueda de las últimas ciudades de los Incas (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 2012).

“Los antepasados peruanos de la antropología americana: la arqueología de los Andes del siglo XIX como nexo de investigación global.” Arqueología y Sociedad (Lima, Perú), vol. 40 (2024): 169-198.

“Skull Walls: The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement,” American Historical Review, vol. 127, no. 3 (September, 2022), pp. 1071-1101.

“Inca Mummy.” In New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities, eds. Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, 127-134. London and Chicago: University of London Press and University of Chicago Press, 2021.

“How to Make an Inca Mummy: Andean Embalming, Peruvian Science, and the Collection of Empire,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society, vol, 109, no. 1 (March, 2018), pp. 1-27.

“Seeing Like an Inca: Julio C. Tello, Indigenous Archaeology, and Pre-Columbian Trepanation in Peru.” Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, eds. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner, 344-377. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

“Marrying Utopia: Mary and Philip, Richard Eden, and the English Alchemy of Spanish Peru.” Entangled Empires: The Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1500-1830, ed. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, 85-104. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

“Fair Necropolis: the Peruvian Dead, the first American Ph.D. in Anthropology, and the World’s Columbian Exposition of Chicago, 1893,” History of Anthropology Review 41 (2017). http://histanthro.org/notes/fair-necropolis/

“A Peru of Their Own: English Grave-Opening and Indian Sovereignty in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3^rd ser., vol. 73, no. 4 (October, 2016), pp. 609-646.

Public History and Journalism (Selected)

“The Mummies from Peru” (“When Inca Mummies Came to Europe” [online]), History Today vol 73, no. 10 (October 2023): 42-55. https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/when-inca-mummies-came-europe

“Why Peruvians were once proud of the skulls they gave the Smithsonian,” The Washington Post, 6 Sept 2023 (print: A17). Digital 3 Sept. 2023, “Why we need to address the Peruvian skeletons in the Smithsonian’s closet”: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/03/smithsonian-peruvian-skulls-return-antiquities/

“As Peru Heads to the 2018 World Cup, Its Star Striker Has Three Inca Mummies to Thank,” NewYorker.com, Elements Blog, 13 February 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/peru-2018-world-cup-star-striker-three-inca-mummies

“The Racism Behind Alien Mummy Hoaxes,” TheAtlantic.com, 1 August 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/08/how-to-fake-an-alien-mummy/535251/

“Cómo fabricar una momia Inca,” Historia Global Online, 5 August 2016. http://historiaglobalonline.com/2016/08/05/como-fabricar-una-momia-inca-por-christopher-heaney/

“How to Make an Inca Mummy,” The Recipes Project, 28 July 2016. http://recipes.hypotheses.org/8092

“Stealing from the Incas,” Op-Ed, The New York Times, October 7, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/opinion/nyregionopinions/07CTheaney.html

“Bonesmen: Did Yale Plunder Peru?” The New Republic, October 23, 2006. https://newrepublic.com/article/65010/did-yale-plunder-peru

Curatorial Work

2024     Re/Collecting the Andes: Andean Art, Science, and the Sacred at Penn State. Exhibition co-curated with Amara Solari featuring the artwork of Kukuli Velarde and Fernando “Coco” Bedoya and the Andean collections of Penn State’s museums, for the teaching gallery of the new Palmer Museum of Art, Penn State, University Park, PA. https://palmermuseum.psu.edu/exhibition/re-collecting-the-andes-andean-art-science-and-the-sacred-at-penn-state/

Impact of Research/Press Coverage of Work (selected)

2024     “Sphere of Influence: Edvard Munch’s The Scream,” BBC Radio 4, 26 November 2024. Interviewed for the influence of a mummified Andean individual on the artwork of Munch. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0025cn4

2024     Cassandra Garrison and Marco Aquino, “Alien fever dreams fuel Peruvian grave robbings,” Reuters, 6 April. https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/alien-fever-dreams-fuel-peruvian-grave-robbings-2024-04-06/

2024     Marco Aviles, “How do we feel when we come face-to-face with our dead ancestors?” El Pais, 15 Mar. 2024. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-03-15/how-do-we-feel-when-we-come-face-to-face-with-our-dead-ancestors.html

2024     Ameríco Mendoza Mori, “Negociando con momias,” Jugo.Pe, 8 Feb., 2024, https://jugo.pe/negociando-con-momias/

2023     “Alleged Alien Corpses Displayed to Mexican Congress Did Not Convince Scientists,” Smithsonian Magazine, 14 September. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/alleged-aliens-corpses-displayed-to-mexican-congress-did-not-convince-scientists-180982900/

2023     “Indiana Jones’s Last Ride: A legacy to celebrate or bury?” Don’t Call Me Resilient Podcast, The Conversation, 29 June 2023: https://theconversation.com/listen-indiana-joness-last-ride-a-legacy-to-celebrate-or-bury-208557

2023     Susan Burlingame, “Three-part project probes, celebrates art, culture and history of Andean peoples,” Penn State News, 7 May. https://www.psu.edu/news/arts-and-architecture/story/three-part-project-probes-celebrates-art-culture-and-history-andean/

2023     “How Indigenous grave robbing took hold in what’s now New England: ‘Astonishing how destructive it was.’” CT Insider, 3 March 2023. https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/indigenous-grave-robbing-new-england-17810749.php

2021    Sarah Pruitt “How Inca Mummies Ruled Over the Living,” History.com, 18 October. https://www.history.com/news/inca-mummies-afterlife

2020     “Una mirada global a la construcción de las momias peruanas,” interview by Juan Lan Ninamango for Onda Histórica Radio Program, FLACSO Radio, Quito, Ecuador, 16 July.

2019     Dave Roos, “Machu Picchu: The Secrets of This Fabled Mountaintop City,” HowStuffWorks, 22 Oct.

2018     Sarah E. Bond, “Pseudoarchaeology and the Racism Behind Ancient Aliens,” Hyperallergic, 13 Nov. 2018.

2018     Daniel A. Gross, “The Casual Colonialism of Lara Croft and Indiana Jones,” Hyperallergic, 6 April 2018

2018     Sarah Zhang, “The Controversial Study of a Girl Who Ufologists Called ‘Alien’,” The Atlantic, 29 March 2018

2011     Interviewed by Ramona Koval on Cradle of Gold for The Book Show, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 21 July 2011.

2010     Interviewed by Diane Orson, “Yale Returns Machu Picchu Artifacts to Peru,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, 15 December 2010.

2008     Guest for hour-long conversation on Hiram Bingham and Machu Picchu, On Point with Tom Ashbrook, National Public Radio, 9 May 2008.

2006     Quoted source for articles on Yale-Machu Picchu dispute in The Christian Science Monitor, USA TODAY, La República (Lima, Peru), and the Yale Daily News.