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About Me
I teach courses at Widener that situate the history of early America in global and Atlantic contexts. We cannot begin to understand the Boston Tea party without understanding the global routes that brought tea and sugar to North America; the history of slavery in the United States without considering global dimensions of the trade in humans; or westward expansion and Indian removal without tracking centuries of interactions between Native peoples and European colonizers. Tracking the "vastness" of early American history illuminates how ordinary people sometimes overlooked in traditional narratives “made” history.
I also have expertise and teaching interests in public history. As the Public History Liaison for the College of Arts and Sciences, I link students with internship opportunities at local historical sites and support public history programming at Widener. In the leadup to the semiquincentennial, I have been working with representatives of the Delaware County Libraries and Radnor Historical Society to connect our communities to top-notch historical research on America’s founding era through Revolutionary Reads.
Research Interests
I am primarily interested in how people from Africa, the Americas, and Europe created a new world for all in the centuries following Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.
My first book, The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity, will be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in September 2025. I am now studying how familial, financial, and political considerations intersected in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. By studying the lives of several generations of the influential Martin family, “Antigua at the Center of the World: The Martin Family and a Violent Atlantic,” will offer new insights into the very personal decisions that shaped the culture and politics of Britain’s empire.
Since coming to Widener, I have also engaged in conversations with Chester community members regarding the city’s history. I research and present on topics ranging from William Penn’s landing to civil rights protests that engulfed the city (and Widener campus) in the early 1960s.