Narrative

I am an historian of early America. My first book, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Cornell, 2002), is about racism in the 18th century. It focuses on the interactions of ordinary people in a slave society, and on the way their intimate relationships (and the treatment of these in court) made racial difference seem increasingly real. My current research is about freethought in the early Republic. I am writing a book about Elihu Palmer, an ardent advocate in New York of some of the most radical ideas coming out of the European Enlightenment. In 2011/12, I was a Fulbright scholar at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies, University of Heidelberg, Germany. In April 2011, I was honored with the Horace T. Morse - University of Minnesota Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education.