I am a historian of colonial and revolutionary America. My research situates early America in a global context by tracing how the transoceanic transfer of commodities and ideas from Asia shaped the colonies which would later become the United States. More broadly, I am interested in studying the commercial and cultural interactions between the Atlantic World and the Pacific during the eighteenth century.

I am now working on my first book titled Medicinal Tea: Global Cultural Transfer and A Vast Early America. It argues that there were close cultural ties between imperial China and British North America. Ideas associated with tea’s medicinal efficacy transferred from China to America in the eighteenth century. China was the most prolific producer of tea in the world until the nineteenth century. Late Ming and Qing (1580-1780) medical practitioners and connoisseurs reinvented the idea that drinking tea could cure a wide array of physical ailments. A combination of Chinese and European commercial and intellectual networks then transferred this knowledge to the Atlantic World from roughly 1600 to 1750. Eighteenth-century Americans consumed large amounts of tea primarily for the health benefits that they learned directly from Chinese sources and indirectly from European intermediaries.

My research has received funding from the American Historical Association, the American Antiquarian Society, the Omohundro Institute, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and New England Region Fellowship Consortium, among others. I have presented my research at University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Historical Society, and Pennsylvania State University. My book reviews appeared in the Journal of Early Republic and Journal of Asian Studies.