I am a historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. My research and teaching engage questions of racial formation, electoral and cultural politics, and battles over historical memory.

My first book, Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation  traces the story of a previously unexamined cohort of teachers, missionaries, and political leaders that I call the “Reconstruction generation.”  Following their effort to establish the first beachhead for multiracial democracy in the South, Requiem for Reconstruction highlights the essential role that this generation’s countermemory of the second founding played as a cultural anchor in the emergent postbellum Black public sphere. Ultimately, this “lost” generation’s struggle against the silencing of their past would produce the modern field of African American history.

I am currently working on a biography of the writer Margaret Walker that frames her 1966 novel Jubilee within a century-long Black freedom struggle in Jackson, Mississippi. A crucial bridge figure between nineteenth and twentieth-century African American history, Walker’s life cycle also sheds new light into some of the quintessential paradoxes that emerged within the nascent neoliberal order of the post-civil rights era American South.

My academic writing has appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of the Civil War Era, American Nineteenth Century History, and the American Historical Review. My public writing has appeared in The Conversation, Muster, and Black Perspectives. My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

At the University of Tennessee, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the postbellum US South, the long Reconstruction era, and the craft of social and cultural history. I am also an associate editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era and oversee the journal’s blog, Muster.