Curriculum Vitae

Raised and educated on the east coast, I have been a committed Californian since I started at UC Davis in 2001. My first book, based on my 2001 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Pennsylvania, traced the creation of a creole culture among Quakers during Pennsylvania's first five decades. My current book project explores similar questions of cultural transformation and power, albeit in a different region of Anglo-America. I have recently embarked on a multigenerational study of the Carter family slaves from roughly the 1600s to the early 1800s, looking at identity formation among slave communities on several Virginian plantations. I have also written previously on gender, politics and the public sphere, and comparative colonization in the Americas.

Research Interests

Early American history (to 1820), with particular interests in religion, culture, and the history of slavery; History of the Atlantic world (to 1820).

Selected Publications

Books:

Articles and Book Chapters:

"Quakers," in Trevor Burnard, ed., Oxford Bibliographies Online:  Atlantic History (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2012) http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com

"Cities, Towns, and Settlements," in John Demos, ed., American Centuries: The Ideas, Issues, and Values That Shaped U.S. History, Volume 2: The Seventeenth Century (Facts on File, 2011), 35-42.

"Becoming Americans: Revisiting Identity and Assimilation in the Colonial Period," Reviews in American History 33 (2005), 29-40 

"From Men of Property to Just Men: Deference, Masculinity, and the Evolution of Political Discourse in Early America," Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 (2005), 37-81 

“The Death of Sawantaeny and the Problem of Justice on the Frontier,” in Daniel K. Richter and William Pencak, eds., Friends and Enemies in Penn’s Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 104-35 

“Incorporated…Into a Body Politic”: Clubs, Print, and the Gendering of the Civic Subject in Eighteenth-Century Pennsylvania,” in Sharon Harris and Mark Kamrath, eds., Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Tennessee, 2004), 47-73

"Hearing Voices: Microhistory, Dialogicality and the Recovery of Popular Culture on an Eighteenth-Century Virginia Plantation," Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 24 (2003):1-23

Course History

Undergraduate Lectures: History 17A: History of the United States to 1877 History 170A: Colonial America History 170B: Revolutionary America History 181: History of Religion in the United States to 1890 Undergraduate Seminars: 102K: Religion and Culture in Early America 102K: Law, Culture, and Society in Early America 102K: Biography and Early American History Graduate Seminars: History 201J: Colonial America History 202H: The Americas in Atlantic Context