About Me

My earliest memory as a historian.

In 6th grade, I had to draft a research paper on either Ancient Rome or Greece. I chose Rome and still have vivid memories of being excited to go to the public library, pull every book on Rome I could find, and spread them out in front of me on one of those quintessentially large library tables. I pored over the books, making notecards and outlines to organize my research and ideas. To me, this felt like real engagement in the learning process, and the process was the most exhilarating learning my preteen brain had ever experienced. I had to write a book report that year as well, and while I enjoyed writing 4 pages about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I didn’t get to engage with the same processes that the history paper had allowed me to, and somehow, that stuck with me. From then on, I associated history with the type of academic learning that I loved and wanted to be a part of.

How did I come to my (proposed) dissertation topic?

Water and the environment are essential to the history of New Orleans. While researching the Bonne Carre Spillway, which opened in 1937, I was introduced to the Mississippi River Commission, created by Congress in 1879. I became interested in knowing how levees were constructed, built, and maintained before the creation of this commission, not only with regard to New Orleans’ American history but its French and Spanish foundations as well. With that question in mind, I set out on my quest and found that much of the research on levees took place in a post-Katrina world and often went back only as far as the 1900s, the beginning of American Louisiana, or were only briefly mentioned in other pieces. While I am still looking for more secondary scholarship and primary sources to support my research and how to bring a unique voice to this conversation, I wish to bring more scholarship on the foundations of New Orleans to light.

As I worked more on the topic, other parts of water-related history, things beyond canals and floods, started appearing. While these were still important to the role that water played in the city, they were not the ones that the city itself seemed the most concerned with, yet were the ones I saw the most secondary work out there on. With that, my research goal shifted to acknowledge yet decenter the role of floods in the history of New Orleans and rather to examine those floods as one piece of the changing role and value of water to the people since the city was founded. The Great Flood of 1927 has put much emphasis on the role of flooding in New Orleans, and it seems that this could be at the expense of deep research on New Orleans prior to the flood and even prior to those charged with its care, ironically the same group that maintained its levees only position, making the flood so disastrous, the Mississippi River Commission.

Other Details

In addition to her academic pursuits in history, Erica is involved in the field of Educational Technology in Arizona, where she serves on the board of the Arizona Technology in Education Association (AZTEA).

Erica, a San Diego County native, lives in Phoenix, Arizona, and holds an MA in History from Arizona State as well as two Bachelor’s degrees and two Master of Education degrees from Northern Arizona University.