Faculty

I am a historian of the United States particularly interested in social and cultural issues in our past. That means I explore a range of issues in the American past -- political, economic, and social -- but I am particularly interested in pursuing the social implications of change: how developments in American history affected different people (different in class, gender, race, say) differently. 

I teach broadly in American social and cultural history: class, politics, race, popular culture, and crime, law, and punishment.

My latest book (UNC Press, 2022) is called: The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South. 

Links to some press on the book: A New Books Network interview with me about the project; A short excerpt or the full interview with the "Tattooed Historian;" a presentation to my hometown Virginia Museum of History and Culture, on YouTube or just audio; and An excerpt from chapter 1 and a brief overview of a theme -- "Confounding White Supremacy" -- on the UNC Press blog.  

I also published a short piece on writing during Covid in the AHA's Perspectives Online that stems from the writing of this book.

An early take on a portion of this material, "The Scaffold's Revival: Race and Public Execution in the South" appeared in the Journal of Social History (September 2011).  Another article, more of a tangent to this project, "What Counts: Trends in Racial Violence in the Postbellum South," appeared in The Journal of American History (September 2013).  

Since this book, I've started to experiment with writing short-form, public-facing pieces, including a couple of pieces published in The Edge: “The Racism of American Capital Punishment” (2023) and “An Anticolonial War in the Heartland? No . . . But . . .” (2024).  In Time's Made by History: "The Troubling Roots of Off-Year Gubernatorial Elections" (2025).

My first book -- The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South --  was a study of sensationalism in Southern culture and journalism from the antebellum period into the twentieth century. 

I received my Masters and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1999. Go Heels!

I began my college career at Hampshire College and finished it -- after several twists and turns including an apprenticeship as a book binder -- at Virginia Commonwealth University.

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