Bio
As Chair of the History Department I oversee the administration and management of our excellent faculty and outstanding programs. Before joining Iowa State University in 2016, I served as Department Chair for four years at a regional state university and for six years before that at a small Liberal Arts college, where I taught for a total of eighteen years, during the first seven of which I also coached the women’s soccer team.
At ISU I teach Western Civilization and Sports History. My research ranges across the modern Atlantic world.
My fourth book, Gilded Age Entrepreneur: The Curious Life of American Financier and Railroader Albert Benton Pullman, (Cornell University Press, 2025) is the biography of a little-known but crucial figure in the history of railroad travel. Albert Pullman designed and marketed Pullman railroad cars and hired the first Black Pullman porters. He personified small-time investors creating corporations by forging connections, issuing shares, and praying for profit. His investments invariably failed but his life was unwaveringly interesting. My first book, British Friendly Societies, 1750-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), studied working-class voluntary insurance associations. Following this was Mother Jones: Raising Cain and Consciousness (University of New Mexico Press, 2010), an introduction to the American labor movement through the life of an amazing organizer. The Iron Road in the Prairie State: The Story of Illinois Railroading (Indiana University Press, 2016) was the first state-focused history of the railroad industry in Illinois and won the George W. and Constance M. Hilton Book Award from the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society. I am also co-editor of a book of essays, Building Positive Peace (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023).
Ask An Historian
When did you know you wanted to be an historian?
Growing up surrounded by the past in England convinced me not only of the reality of history but also of the importance of studying it. This is the only career path, apart from professional soccer player or train driver, that I ever wanted to follow. Historian turned out to be the only realistic option of the three.