I am a historian of colonial North America and the United States, with a particular focus on efforts to abolish slavery in the Revolutionary Era and in the Nineteenth Century. My book Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Three Hills/ Cornell 2022), is a multi-generational biography that tells the story of founding father John Jay, his descendants, and the enslaved and formerly enslaved members of their households. The book traces personal, regional, and national arcs from the colonial period to the early 20th century. My work on the Jays builds upon two of my previous books—a monograph on the abolition of slavery in New York and, with David Quigley, a document collection on debates about race and citizenship in New York from the Revolution through Reconstruction. I have also published essays on the Missouri Compromise, on James Fenimore Cooper, and on Bruce Springsteen. In addition, I co-authored the colonial history textbook American Odysseys (Oxford 2014) and present widely to scholarly and general audiences. I have served two terms on the editorial board of the Journal of the Early Republic and have held research fellowships at the Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.

Media Publications:

• “Tower of Strength,” New York Archives, Summer 2024.
• “Voting Rights Debate a Racial Reckoning”: Albany Times Union, February 6, 2022.
• “The Long Selma Moment”: Historians Against Slavery http://www.historiansagainstslavery.org/main/2015/02/the-long-selma-moment/ (posted February 23, 2015).
• Modern Scholar Podcast (released November 7, 2023).
• C-SPAN 2, C-SPAN 3, C-SPAN Radio, CSPAN.ORG, https://www.c-span.org/video/?523632-1/libertys-chain (released January 14, 2023)

Scholarly Publications:

• Liberty’s Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York (Ithaca: Three Hills, an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2022).
• “Sharing the Founders’ Flame: John Jay, Missouri, and Memory,” in A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume 1: Western Slavery, National Impasse, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021).
• “”The master and the man must change places for a season’: Untangling Historical Narratives of Race and Loyalty in The Spy,” The James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal 32, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2021), 5-27.
• American Odysseys: A History of Colonial North America, co-author, Timothy J. Shannon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
• “Darkness on the Edge of Town: Springsteen, Richard Ford, and the American Dream,” in Kenneth Womack, Jerry Zolten, and ¬Mark Bernhard eds., Bruce Springsteen, Cultural Studies, and the Runaway American Dream (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2012).