Crawford earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh, he M.A. at the University of California Los Angeles, and her B.A. at Kalamazoo College. Dr. Crawford is a historian of Latin America. Her research has focused on Colombia, circum-Caribbean migration, maritime borderlands, and the experience of Afro-Latin Americans. Dr. Crawford has published her work in venues such as Historia Critica, the New West Indian Guide, Internatiional Journal of Maritime History, and Global South. She was a Fulbright Research and Lecture scholar at the Universidad de los Andes in 2015/16. Her current book project The Last Turtlemen: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Crossing in the Maritime Caribbean is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.