Provost and Senior Vice President, Academic Affairs
I am an historian of early America interested in the intersections of work, family and community. Much of my research has focused on the ways that enslaved people in the post-Revolutionary Upper South struggled to gain and maintain legal freedom through the process of manumission. After relocating to Merrimack more than a decade ago, my efforts to bring more local primary sources into my survey class led me gain a deeper understanding for the tensions and challenges that Americans faced following their successful bid for independence. This led me to write a narrative history entitled “Shays’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America,” which was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2015. Currently, I am working on a synthetic history that examines the broad spectrum and evolution of labor obligations in the Early Modern Atlantic World.
Books
“Labor Obligations in the Atlantic World,” under contract with Routledge Press.
“Shays’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
Journal Articles
“Recent Scholarship on Slavery and Emancipation in Baltimore,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 108:1 (Winter, 2012), 476-83.
“The Significance of Group Manumission in Post-Revolutionary Rural Maryland,” Slavery and Abolition 32:1 (March, 2011), 75-89.
