As a Ph.D. candidate, KC’s research at the University of Pennsylvania focuses on human-animal relationships and agrarian societies throughout the early modern Atlantic World, focusing on the colonial Andes. His current dissertation focuses on human-herd entanglements in colonial Cusco and Lima.
Prior to Penn, KC graduated from Yale in 2020 with a master's in history where he focused on unearthing the roles of 18th-century Spanish widows in the production of international wool products, the power of cattle in the construction of colonial Kingston, Jamaica, as well as the connections between Cuba and the United States through the trade of pork and lard at the beginning of the 19th century. In 2019, KC graduated with honors in History and Environmental Studies from Wesleyan University, where he completed a senior thesis centering the interspecies interactions between humans and pigs throughout the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
While at Penn, KC served as the co-president of Clio, the history department’s graduate student organization, in the 2021-2022 academic year. He also served as the Social Chair of the History Department for the 2022-2023 academic year.
In 2023, KC was awarded the School of Arts and Sciences Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students. He was also awarded the Teaching Assistant of the Year Award by the Department of History’s student-run Undergraduate Advisory Board (HUAB), which recognizes “the teaching assistant who best demonstrates a genuine commitment to the well-being of the department’s undergraduate community.”
His current dissertation project has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Society for Environmental History (ASEH), the American Historical Association (AHA), the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, and the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn.
M.A., History, University of Pennsylvania, 2023
M.A., History, Yale University, 2020
B.A., History and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University, 2019
Human-Animal Relationships
Animal History
Environmental History
Iberian Atlantic
Colonial Andes
Early Modern Atlantic World
Colonial Latin America
Agrarian Societies
History of Science and Medicine
Instructor of Record:
“LARP 5400: Landscape Histories II,” Jessica Varner, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Spring 2025
Teaching Assistant:
“Modern Latin America 1808-Present,” Melissa Teixeira, Assistant Professor of History, Spring 2023
“Colonial Latin America to 1810,” Marcy Norton, Associate Professor of History, Fall 2022
“American Origins,” Emma Hart, Professor of History, Spring 2022
“American Diplomatic History Since 1776,” Walter A. McDougall, Professor of History, Fall 2021
O'Hara, K.C. (2019). Porcine Empires: An Environmental History of Pigs in the Spanish Colonization of the New World, 1493-1800. Wesleyan University Digital Collections, Honors Theses. https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/object/ir-21
American Historical Association
American Society for Environmental History