Biography
I am a historian of political thought and American society in the long nineteenth century, with a particular interest in the transatlantic circulation of political ideas. My research and teaching focus on how reformers responded to the upheavals of industrial capitalism, mass immigration, and the changing organization of civil society. I write about European political exiles in the United States, the transformation of republicanism, and the conflicts over labor and property that recast democratic politics after the Civil War.
I am a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. My first book, Reform in the Age of Capital: The Social Question in Nineteenth-Century America, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. My recent article in Modern Intellectual History, “A Civil Society Divided Against Itself: The Fight for Shorter Hours in Antebellum America,” examines how debates over time, labor, and independence generated a critique of “social tyranny” and redefined democratic citizenship.
I also write on television, film, and popular culture. Trained in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I focused on Frankfurt School critical theory and the emergence of film criticism in the 1930s and 1940s. My essays have appeared in Cæsura, Gruppe, and Jacobin.