I am a historian of the modern United States whose research and teaching explores questions of political economy and social change in the twentieth-century South and Appalachia through the histories of women, gender and labor. My writing engages a range of topics, from women in country music and sports to histories of labor organizing in Appalachia. I am also committed to fostering public history in the classroom and beyond, by collaborating with museums, organizations, and community partners.

My first book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2019), traces the alliances forged and the grassroots movements led by working-class women in the Appalachian South in the 1960s and 1970s. The book received the H.L. Mitchell Award for distinguished book on the southern working class from the Southern Historical Association and Honorable Mention from the Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History. The dissertation on which the book was based won the OAH Lerner-Scott Prize and the Labor and Working-Class History’s Herbert Gutman Prize.

I am currently working on two book projects. They’ll Never Keep Us Down: A Women’s History of Appalachia, under contract with Simon & Schuster, will be the first narrative history of the Mountain South through the lives of women who lived and worked in the region from the late nineteenth century to the present. My other project, In Sisterhood, In Struggle: Encountering Feminism in the American South (UNC Press), explores the understudied yet expansive forms of feminist activism throughout the South and Appalachia from the 1960s through the1990s. Along with scholarly projects, I have written regularly for popular media outlets including 100 Days in Appalachia, Boston Review, NPR, Rewire News, Washington Post, Oxford American, and Longreads.

I have collaborated on or co-founded several oral history and public history projects, including the Long Women’s Movement Project at the Southern Oral History Program, the Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi to document LGBTQ+ history in Mississippi, and the Black Families of Yalobusha County Oral History Project at the University of Mississippi. At WVU, I collaborated with women coal miners on an oral history project documenting their lives and work. Their collection will be archived at the West Virginia & Regional History Center.

Before coming to the University of Tennessee, I was on faculty at West Virginia University and the University of Mississippi. I am a former visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and I was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Fellowship during 2021-2023.

Currently, I serve as the senior associate editor of LABOR: Studies in Working Class History (Duke University Press).