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About Me

I am an historian of colonial America, the antebellum South, and the Caribbean, with particular interests in slavery, race, gender, and material culture. I teach a variety of courses on American history, including modules on race, gender, and sexuality in the South, the American Gothic tradition, and the United States as a postcolonial nation.

My first monograph, Settler Society in the English Leeward Islands, 1670-1776 (Cambridge University Press, 2010) won the Royal Historical Society’s Gladstone Prize. I am currently completing a book on horse-racing, elite formation, and regional and national identity in the 19th-century U.S., after which I will begin a new project on the ways in which absentee planters from the West Indies transformed the social, cultural, and material world of London in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

I am active in public history initiatives, most recently having organized a Black History Month exhibition at Manchester’s Portico Library, on the history of slavery and abolition in Manchester (https://www.creativetourist.com/event/bittersweet-legacies-of-slavery-and-abolition-in-manchester/).

Recent Publications

“The Caribbean and West Indies,” in Jeremy Gregory, ed., The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. II: Establishment and Empire: The Development of Anglicanism, 1662-1829 (Oxford University Press, 2017)

“Great Tangled Cousinries: Jewish Intermarriage in the British West Indies,” in Michael Halevy, ed., A Sefardic Pepper-Pot in the Caribbean: History, Language, Art, and Culture (Tirocinio, 2016)

“Reading the Rebels and Mining the Maps: Digital Humanities and Cartographic Narratives,” American Historical Review 121:1 (February 2016)

“Intimate Enemies: French and English Settlers and Commentators in Colonial St. Kitts,” Revista de Indias 75: 263 (April 2015)

“The Freest Country: Jews of the British Atlantic, ca. 1600-1800,” in D’Maris Coffman, et al., eds., The Atlantic World (Routledge, 2014)

“Unsettled Houses: The Material Culture of the Missionary Project in Jamaica in the Era of Emancipation,” Slavery and Abolition 35:3 (Autumn 2014); co-authored with Laurence Brown. Reprinted in Christer Petley and Stephan Lenik, eds., Material Cultures of Slavery and Abolition in the British Caribbean (Routledge, 2016)

“West Indian Echoes: Dodington House, the Codrington Family, and Caribbean Heritage,” in Madge Dresser, et al., eds., Slavery and the British Country House (English Heritage, 2013)

Media Coverage

https://manchesterwire.co.uk/#!/new-exhibition-bittersweet-at-the-portico

Social Media

Country Focus

United States, Britain, Barbados, Jamaica, Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Kitts

Expertise by Geography

Atlantic, Caribbean, England, North America, United Kingdom, United States

Expertise by Chronology

17th century, 18th century, 19th century, Early Modern

Expertise by Topic

American Founding Era, Colonialism, Emancipation, Gender, Museums, Public History, Race, Sexuality, Slavery, Women