Bio
As a peripatetic Marine Corps “brat,” roving Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas, I grew up a natural observer of the politics, economy, and culture of southern rural life. After completing my doctorate at the University of South Carolina, I enjoyed two years teaching at the University of Idaho, and moved to Iowa State in 2008.
Research
My research examines the development of the southern United States, considering how seemingly competing notions of freedom and slavery, tradition and change, honor and reform shaped the region. Political struggle and social anxiety marked southerners’ lives—on the plantation, in the fields, and within their sanctuaries. Understanding how women and men—enslaved, free, and at all stages in between—ordered their worlds and negotiated political, economic, and social relations informs the questions I ask and the projects I pursue.
My first book, “Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South” (Cambridge University Press, 2014), examines enslaved people’s underground economic lives—both as buyers and sellers of goods—to understand how slavery functioned at the local level.
Currently, I’m at work on three research projects. With Lawrence McDonnell, I’m writing a book entitled, “Dark Bargain: Love, Murder, and Vengeance in the Old South.” On the surface, it’s the surprising story of Martin Posey, who hires his enslaved man, Appling, to murder his wife so he can run off with her sister to gold rush California. Complications ensue. There’s murder, sex, and witchcraft, but also a deeper story about slavery, informal law, kinship, and fraying bonds of community.
My second book in progress, “Whiplash: War and Freedom in the South’s Most Violent Town” offers a case study of Edgefield, South Carolina – a community unknown to most 21st century observers of southern life and culture, but notorious in 19th century America for its culture of violence and as hotbed of secessionist conflict and post-Civil War tension. In doing so, it challenges historiographies of the region and the period that explain emancipation in linear terms and offers a richly-textured view of the informal politics of everyday life that shaped how freedom was made and lost in the 1860s.
These projects build to my third book, “Bonds Burst Asunder: The Revolutionary Politics of Getting By in Civil War and Emancipation, 1860-1867.” Here, I examine the transformation of southern political economy, exploring how crisis and transition generated contradictions in slavery’s cruel paternalist bargain. Stretching from the Confederacy’s creation to the rise of Military Reconstruction, it examines two central questions: how did black and white southerners recreate and transform relations of power in the chaos of civil war and emancipation? And how did a political economy of “getting by” in wartime shape the way old ties were exploded and new ways negotiated?
I’m grateful to have received fellowship support from the American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society and Boston Athenaeum, the Library of Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania (through the Program in Early American Economy and Society), the New-York Historical Society, the Summersell Center at the University of Alabama, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, and the John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American History at Duke University. In 2018, ISU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences recognized me with the Dean’s Emerging Faculty Leader Award.
Teaching and Service
From 2022 to 2025, I served as Vice President, Teaching Division, of the American Historical Association. Across the nation, history teachers at all levels face enormous pressures and shoulder immense responsibilities. In my role as VP, I created spaces and resources for educators to share tools and sharpen students’ inquiries about the past, and the structures and communities in which they live. I sought to overcome barriers between history teachers at all levels and the broader public, promoting better understandings of the work we do, the passions that drive us, and the value of our labor to create a new generation of question-askers and problem solvers, so central to building a democratic society.
I teach a range of course at the undergraduate and graduate level, including:
- HIST 2210: US Survey I (face-to-face and online)
- HIST 3010: The Historian’s Craft
- HIST 4550: Civil War and Reconstruction
- HIST 4610: The Rural South
- HIST 4950: Senior Capstone Seminar
- HIST 5110b: Readings in Nineteenth-Century US History
- HIST 5520a: Readings in US Rural and Agricultural History
- HIST 5930b: Research Seminar in Nineteenth Century History
- Experimental Courses and Independent studies: Transatlantic Slavery, Reconstruction and Emancipation, US Slavery, Nineteenth-Century Market Culture, and American Consumerism
I am actively involved with AHA’s Career Diversity Initiative both as Director of Graduate Education within the Department of History and as panelist and co-facilitator in AHA-sponsored events and workshops. I’ve chaired the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Honors Committee and served on the university library’s committee on Open and Affordable Education. I’ve worked with Des Moines high school teachers through the Department of Education’s Teaching American History program and facilitated discussions with members of the Ames community through the American Library Association’s “Let’s Talk About It” series on the Civil War.
Ask An Historian
When did you know you wanted to be an historian?
I was all in on STEM until high school. In my sophomore year, l I took trig and was bored silly, felt like all I was doing was memorizing formulas. That same semester I took a fantastic history course in which the teacher required that I ask questions, pursue them, and back my conclusions with evidence from the past. I totally changed course. I realize now that I might have found similar satisfaction as a researcher and analyst in the sciences, but I think I have more fun as a historian.