Expertise
Nineteenth-Century American History, African-American History, Transnational History, Public HistoryResearch Interests
Nineteenth-Century American Trade and Diplomacy, American Slavery in a Global ContextEducation
Ph.D.: History, (2021), University of VirginiaM.A.: History (2018), University of Virginia
B.A.: History, Arabic Studies, (2016), Williams College
Biosketch
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 2021. Before coming to UMass Lowell, I served as a Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia University. At both UVA and Columbia, I worked on larger research projects investigating the institutions’ historical ties to slavery as well as the central role of racism in the development of American higher education, work that I hope to continue at UMass Lowell. My individual research establishes how overlapping commercial, diplomatic, and personal relationships between American merchants and their foreign counterparts contributed to globalization during the nineteenth century. My book project, "Monsoon Yankees," traces the integration of American commodities, specie and financial practices into trade networks that stretched across the Western Indian Ocean. My manuscript uncovers the crucial role that Americans played in the development of a distinct Indo-Atlantic commercial framework that eased cross-cultural trade between American, European, Indian, Arab and East African traders.Selected Publications
- With Ian Iverson, “From Jeffersonian Republicanism to Southern Nationalism: Faculty Engagement with Proslavery Thought at the University of Virginia, 1825-1861,” American Nineteenth Century History vol. 21, no. 1 (2022), 21-40, (with Ian Iverson0
- “We Have Lived & Loved as Brothers’: Honor, Friendship, and Violence at the University of Virginia 1825-1861,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography vol. 129, no. 3 (2021), 210-234
- Review of The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University by Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy in Virginia Magazine of History and Biography vol. 130, no. 2 (2022), 154–55
Research Currently in Progress
Monsoon Yankees: American Merchants and the Commercial Integration of the Indo-Atlantic World“One Step from Slavery: American Merchants and the East African Slave Trade, 1830-1860”