I am a broadly trained scholar of US history, specializing in the intersections of gender, business, and political history in the decades between the Revolution and Reconstruction. I am a Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My research uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways that different facets of identity continually shaped the way that individuals in the nineteenth-century United States experienced, interacted with, and shaped the political, economic, legal, and cultural forces that shaped their lives. Trained as a women’s historian, my work brings the insights of recent works in women’s and gender history, along with theoretical work on affect and emotion, to bear on legal, economic, and political history. My work explores the economic and political implications of the connections between the “private,” domestic world of the family and the “public” world of governance at the federal, state, and local levels. I focus on southern families to tell a national story with continued resonance—the creation of a governing system intertwined with the familial networks of the elite. Both my research and teaching are fundamentally concerned with questions of gender, race, and region, particularly how different facets of identity shaped the way that individuals experienced and interacted with the political, economic, legal, and cultural forces that shaped their lives.

I am currently writing a book tentatively titled A Republic of Credit: Building a National Family from Revolution to Reconstruction (under contract with Oxford University Press), which explores the relationship between emotional family bonds, credit, and the development of commerce and governance in the United States.

I defended my dissertation, “Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States,” at Duke University in September 2018. I also hold an M.A. (2012) and a B.A. (2011) in history from Mississippi State University.