Teaching

I have a wide range of teaching interests, including early America, transnational histories, media history, political history, digital history, historical methods, the histories of Atlantic and American slavery, and more.

I am also deeply interested in experimental history pedagogies. I have recently published a pedagogical essay with the Journal of American History titled “Clearing the Graveyard: Public Writing in and Out of the History Classroom” (March 2021).

Courses taught

American History I. Indiana University–Bloomington, Spring 2022. Survey course on early America, focusing on the intersection of Atlantic slavery, settler colonialism, and emerging notions of “freedom.”

The American Revolution. Smith College, Spring 2021. This course offered an analysis of a familiar event from the perspective of women, enslaved people, and non-elites, while also setting the event in an Atlantic and imperial context.

Vast Early America. Smith College, Fall 2020. This survey of early America to roughly 1800 focused on the intertwined histories of slavery and settler colonialism, while also seeking to set early American history in a continental, Atlantic, and global context.

American Scandal, 1700–present. Smith College, Spring 2020. This lecture course focused on media, ethics, race, gender, and sexuality across the broad expanse of American history. Students completed a semester-long podcast project, available here.

Doing Digital History. Smith College, Spring 2020. This course offered an introduction to digital history’s public, collaborative, computational, and interpretive dimensions through a local history project using ArcGIS StoryMaps to create an exhibit about antislavery in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Fake News in American History. Smith College, Fall 2019, Fall 2020. This course focused on information literacy, media history, and the historical roots of “fake news” and media dysfunction in our present.

The Historian’s Craft. Smith College, Fall 2019, Spring 2021. Introduction to historiography, history as a discipline, and historical methods. (co-taught with Jeff Ahlman)

Scandal in the Early United States. Spring 2019, Indiana State University. Examined the political and moral dimensions of scandal in the early American republic as a window onto gender, sexuality, and media. Syllabus.

The Civil War. Spring 2019, Indiana State University. Focused on the cultural, political, and social history of the U.S. Civil War. We explored issues of causation, memory, trauma, and sensory experience. Syllabus.

The Long Nineteenth Century, 1800–1917. Summer 2019, Summer 2020, Indiana University–Southeast. Graduate-level course, designed for dual-enrollment high school history teachers in the state of Indiana. Engaged with the major historiographical issues in nineteenth-century U.S. history, ranging from the history of capitalism, to emancipation, to the often-forgotten experiences of Native Americans in this period.

Facts, Hoaxes, and Fake News (or, the History of Bullshit): Fall 2018, Indiana University, Collins Honors College. Interdisciplinary seminar focused on information literacy, media history, and “genres” of bullshit.

Revolutionary America: Summer 2017, Indiana University. Six-week summer course on the social, cultural, and political worlds of the American Revolution. Paid particular attention to geographies of the revolution, memory, and the lived experiences of ordinary people, including women, Native peoples, and African Americans.

United States History Since 1877: Summer 2016, Purdue University–Northwest. Online summer survey course. Designed to provoke curiosity, encourage students to draw connections between past and present, and to use the study of history of understand the world around them.