Bio
I am a historian of political thought, trans-Atlantic intellectual history, and American society in the long nineteenth century. In my historical research and teaching, I explore three key issues that have defined political life in nineteenth-century America: the mass immigration of European exiles into American civil-society associations, the transformation of the republican tradition, and the social crisis of labor & property after the Civil War.
I am currently a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. I am working on my first book, Reform in the Age of Capital: The Social Question in Nineteenth-Century America, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. My latest article “A Civil Society Divided Against Itself: The Fight for Shorter Hours in Antebellum America,” published in Modern Intellectual History, examines how debates over time, labor, and independence generated a novel critique of “social tyranny” and redefined democratic citizenship.
Outside of my historical research, I review television shows, film, and popular culture phenomena. I received my training in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where I focused on Frankfurt School Critical Theory. This work has been published in Cæsura, Gruppe and Jacobin.