- Ph.D., History, Princeton University, 2019
- M.A., History, Princeton University, 2014
- M.A., Human Rights Studies, Columbia University, 2009
- B.A., Government, The University of Texas at Austin, 2007
I’m a historian of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, with interests in labor history, political economy, and the social history of ideas. My first book, The Labor of Liberty: Work and the Problem of Freedom in American History (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press, Politics and Culture in Modern America Series), examines the relationship between work and freedom from the rise of abolitionism to the present. The book examines how freedom became associated with work and how that relationship changed amid the social transformations wrought by abolition, industrialization, deindustrialization, and the ascent of low-wage service sector work.
My next project will examine the changing nature and meaning of the family. Conceived as a global labor history of the Volcker Shock, I hope to write a narrative history of the experience of working-class families in Latin America and the United States amid the abrupt and profound turmoil caused by the sharp rise in interest rates in the early 1980s. Through a social history of the idea of the family, this book will examine how deindustrialization and debt crises reconstituted the discourse, social formation, and political meaning of the family.
At SLU, I teach courses on U.S. labor history and 20th century political economy. I received my Ph.D. in History from Princeton University. I am on leave this 2021-2022 academic year, when I’ll be a Fellow-In-Residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.
Recent News
Fellow-In-Residence (Harvard University); Reed Fink Award in Southern Labor History (Georgia State University); Sam Fishman Grant (Wayne State University); John Edwin Pomfret Fellowship (Princeton University); Davis Prize (Princeton University).
- U.S. Labor History
- U.S. Economic History
- Intellectual History
- Intellectual History of Work
- 20th Century U.S. Political Economy
- “Work and the American Moral Imagination, 1940-1996,” Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
- “Deindustrializing the Good Life: Work, Automation, and Subaltern Visions of Freedom in Post-World War II United States,” Department of History, Yale University, December 10, 2020.
- LHIS 601 – U.S. Labor History
- LABR 302 – Contemporary Labor Issues: The Future of Work
- The Labor and Working-Class History Association
