RESEARCH AND WRITING (CV)
I received a BA from the University of Cambridge and a PhD from Harvard University. I joined the Department of History and the University of Maryland in 2006, earned tenure in 2012 and promotion to the rank of full professor in 2020.
I have published more than a dozen articles and chapters as well as three books.
I am presently an Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2021-2023) and have held research fellowships at more than two dozen libraries and institutes including residencies at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance at Yale University and the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. My work has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
I am proud to serve as a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a trustee of the Maryland Center for History and Culture, an elected member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and as a board member of the Prince George’s County Memorial Library System Foundation.
I live in University Park, Maryland, with my wife and two daughters.
BOOKS
Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home. Published by Simon & Schuster in 2019, it was the recipient of the NEH Public Scholar Award and a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. Stolen is the true story of five boys who were kidnapped in the North and smuggled into slavery in the Deep South—and their daring attempt to escape and bring their captors to justice.
We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). This is the first book to examine the role that discourse regarding self-destruction played in the cultural formation of the early republic.
Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). This co-edited volume of essays centers on the experience of incarcerated subjects and citizens in early America, and is the product of a conference organized at the McNeil Center in 2009.
ARTICLES IN REFEREED JOURNALS
“Counterfeit Kin: Kidnappers of Color, the Reverse Underground Railroad, and the Origins of Practical Abolition,” Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 2 (2018), 199-230.
“The Moral Thermometer: Rush, Republicanism, and Suicide,” Early American Studies 15, no. 2 (2017), 308-331.
“’Thence to Patty Cannon’s’: Gender, Family, and the Reverse Underground Railroad,” Slavery & Abolition 37, no. 1 (2016): 661-679.
“The Great Jugular Vein of Slavery: New Histories of the Domestic Slave Trade,” History Compass 11, no. 12 (2013): 1150-1164.
“Slave Suicide, Abolition and the Problem of Resistance,” Slavery & Abolition 33, no. 4 (2012): 525-549.
“In Werther’s Thrall: Suicide and the Power of Sentimental Reading in Early National America,” Early American Literature 46, no. 1 (2011): 93-120. Winner of Nineteenth-Century Studies Association's Emerging Scholar Award, 2012.
“The Double Guilt of Dueling: The Stain of Suicide in Anti-Dueling Rhetoric in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 29, no. 3 (2009): 383-410.
“‘Our People die well’: Death-bed Scenes in John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine,” Mortality 10, no. 3 (2005): 210-223.
CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
“Introduction” in Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, ed. Michele Lise Tarter and Richard Bell (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012): 1-32. Co-authored with Michele Lise Tarter.
“Weeping for Werther: Suicide, Sympathy and the Reading Revolution in Early America” in The History of Reading: International Perspectives, c.1500-1990, ed. W. R. Owens and Shafquat Towheed (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 48-63.
“John Pierce’s Pitch Pipe: Music and Myth-construction in Early National Celebrations,” in New England Celebrates: Spectacle, Commemoration, and Festivity, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 2000): 83-104.