Willa is a Teaching Fellow at Fordham University pursuing a Ph.D. in economic and environmental history. Her specialization is in the ecosystems and economies of the early American republic, specifically: agrarian communities’ systems of economic control and decontrol.
Willa's work focuses on how communities used non-money-things to enact monetary policy, freeing money from the state — and attempting to assert their own economic autonomy in doing so. Her research has, thus far, focused on the use of whiskey as money in western Pennsylvania (as an alternative to the new dollar), and the use of grain as money (and as leverage against the state via export controls) in the rural Hudson Valley. More broadly, she is interested in how monetary and fiscal programs are developed in times of crisis, and how groups of people managed their relations to the land and the value flows produced by/with that land.
Willa was born and raised in Indiana. With her wife, Janneane, she helped run Printtext, a bookstore and community space, where she published cultural broadsheets, designed album covers, and made books about soundscape ecologies. Their most recent book project was Stations: Listening to the Deep Earth (Jap Sam Books, 2022) commissioned by the Anchorage Museum and National Geographic Society.
Willa and Janneane now live in the Lower East Side with their three year old.