Director, Public History Program:
Director, Initiative in Public Humanities, School of Arts and Sciences
Co-Editor of Book Reviews, Journal of the Early Republic
Editor, Global Perspectives on Public History Series, Routledge
RESEARCH INTERESTS
I am a social and legal historian of poverty, welfare, policing, and incarceration in the nineteenth century US, and a scholar and practitioner of public history. My research focuses on subsistence and class in American history and how laws and policies around these topics evolve and have been experienced by the people who interacted with them. My first book, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (NYU Press, 2019), is a legal and social history of the criminalization of homelessness through vagrancy laws and poor laws in the early national Northeastern states. My research has been published in the Law and History Review, Journal of the Early Republic, The Public Historian, Time Magazine, and elsewhere. I am also committed to the production of critical public historical narratives about the past with communities and regularly collaborate on local and state history projects. My next book brings these fields together in a scholarly analysis of public history practice: Curating Poverty: Public Histories of Class in Museums and Historic Sites will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2027.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Curating Poverty: Public Histories of Class in Museums and Historic Sites (University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming 2027)
- Complex Commonwealth: Public History in Pennsylvania, coedited with Margaret Jerrido and Jeanine Mazak-Kahne, forthcoming from Temple University Press, 2027).
- Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (New York University Press, 2019)
- “'As bleak as it was for the paupers:’ Preservation and Interpretation of American Almshouse Museums,” Museum and Society, accepted and forthcoming, 2026
- “The Slumsonian: Contests over the Interpretation of Housing Inequality in the National Museum,” The Public Historian, accepted and forthcoming 2027
- “Creating Prisoners, Creating 'Tombs for Living Men' in the Early American Republic,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History, eds Melanie Newport and John Bardes, Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2026.
- “Almshouse Shoe Scraps,” ’76 Objects: A Special Issue of the American Historical Review 132, no. 2, July 2026.
- “‘Distressing the Distressed’: Rent Distraint in Early Republic New York,” Law and History Review 43, no. 4 (November 2025), 771 – 794.
- “Trump’s War on ‘Vagrancy’ Has a Dark History,” TIME Magazine, September 16, 2025, https://time.com/7315567/vagrancy-laws-history/
- “Overseers of the Poor: Relief, Surveillance, and Control in the Early Republic Northeast,” Journal of the Early Republic 44, no. 2 (Summer 2024).
- “‘People first’: Commemorating Houselessness and Poverty,” The Public Historian vol. 45, no. 1 (January 2023).
SELECTED PUBLIC HISTORY PROJECTS
- Co-facilitator, Pequannock Community History Project (2022-ongoing) including co-curation of Our History: Slavery and Freedom in Pequannock, exhibit at Pequannock Township Public Library, Pequannock, NJ, 2025-26
- Co-facilitator, Geology Museum Collections Project, Rutgers University (2020-2024)
- Co-PI for “Shelter”, Luce Foundation Grant-funded Public Humanities Project (2020-2021), https://shelternj.org/ ; Academic Consultant and Oral Historian, Shelter Podcast (2021-2022), https://shelternj.org/podcast
- Curator, “Labor Sweated Here: Histories of Workers and Environments in New Jersey,” Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University (2020-2021)
- Curator, PI, supervisor of student curators, and public programming coordinator/host, “Climate Justice is Worker Justice in New Brunswick, NJ,” in Humanities Action Lab traveling exhibit, Climates of Inequality: Stories of Environmental Justice (2018-21), https://climatesofinequality.org/story/climate-justice-is-worker-justice/
COURSES TAUGHT
Undergraduate:
- Public History: Theory, Method, and Practice
- Public History Internship
- History of Homelessness: Unhoused Populations in US History
- New Jersey History
- Revising Rutgers: Architecture, History, & Preservation on Campus (co-taught with Prof. Carla Yanni, Art History)
Graduate
- Introduction to Public Humanities
- Colloquium in American History: Carceral history from the 17th to the 19th century
SELECTED AWARDS & FELLOWSHIPS
- G. Wesley Johnson Award for Best Article published in The Public Historian in 2023, awarded by National Council on Public History
- New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Teaching Award, 2024
- Andrew W. Mellon Research Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2023-2024
- Research Fellowship, Program in Early American Economy & Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, 2023-202
- Co-PI, with Jorge Marcone, Sustaining Public Engagement Grant, American Council of Learned Societies, 2022-23
- Award of Recognition for Significant Contributions to State History, New Jersey Historical Commission, 2020