I’m a professor in the History Department at Georgetown University. I study the history of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, and the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in Atlantic history, 19th century U.S history, and the history of slavery.
My most recent book is Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2015). The book tells the story of three slave children who were taken from New Orleans to Cuba by their owner during the U.S. Civil War, and their mother’s effort to recover them. Beyond Freedom’s Reach was named a Humanities Book of the Year by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, and it received the Jefferson Davis Book Award from the American Civil War Museum, and the Margaret T. Lane/Virginia F. Saunders Memorial Research Award from the Government Documents Roundtable of the American Library Association. My first book was Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Harvard University Press, 2005).
I served on Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation in 2015-2016, and I’m currently the principal curator of the Georgetown Slavery Archive.
