Expertise
American History, African-American History, Transnational History, Public History, Indian Ocean HistoryResearch Interests
Nineteenth-Century American Trade and Diplomacy, American Slavery, American Higher EducationEducation
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 in 2023, I served as a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia University. At UVA and Columbia, I worked on research projects examining institutional ties to slavery as well as the broader impact of race on the development of American higher education.
At UMass Lowell, I teach a wide range of courses about American and transnational history including "U.S. History to 1877,” “Race and American Higher Education," "American Slavery: History, Fiction, and Film,” “the World of the Atlantic” and "the Indian Ocean World."
My current research investigates how commercial, diplomatic, and personal relationships between American merchants and their foreign counterparts contributed to globalization during the nineteenth century. Focused on the East African island of Zanzibar, my manuscript, “Monsoon Yankees: American Merchants and the Commercial Integration of the Indo-Atlantic World,” traces the incorporation of American commodities and capital into trade networks crisscrossing the Western Indian Ocean. My scholarship establishes 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
- “Amity, Commerce, and Compromise: Americans, Indians, and the Evolution of Trade on Zanzibar and Across the Western Indian Ocean, 1825-1861,” Journal of World History vol. 35, no. 2 (2024), 199-227
- “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 Iverson)
- “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," under contract with Columbia University Press
- “One Step from Slavery: American Merchants and the East African Slave Trade, 1830-1860”