Directory

Research Interests

• American intellectual, cultural, and religious history
• Changing conceptions of sin, wrongdoing, and moral responsibility
• American slavery debate
• The history of morality and humanitarianism

Current Projects

• I am working on a book on changing conceptions of sin, wrongdoing, and moral responsibility in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American moral thought.
• “The Sins of Slaves and the Slaves of Sin: Toward a History of Moral Agency” for The Worlds of American Intellectual History.

Courses Taught

• American Civilization before 1865 (HY 103)
• Honors American Civilization before 1865 (HY 105)
• American Thought and Culture before 1860
• American Thought and Culture since 1860
• American Religious History before 1870
• Morality and Social Change
• Slavery, Freedom, and Authority
• Undergraduate Writing Seminar
• Literature of American History to 1865 (graduate)

Awards and Honors

• Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities (2014-2015)
• Distinguished Fellow of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (Spring 2015)
• Summer Stipend, National Endowment for the Humanities (2013)
• Frederick A. and Marion S. Pottle Fellowship in 18^th-Century British Studies, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (2013)
• J. Carlyle Sitterson Visiting Scholar Grant, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2013)
• Lapides Fellowship in Pre-1865 Juvenile Literature and Ephemera, American Antiquarian Society (2013)
• Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Library Company of Philadelphia and Historical Society of Pennsylvania (2013)
• Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism Research Travel Grant, University of Notre Dame (2013)
• Research Grants Committee Award, University of Alabama (2011)
• John Highbarger Memorial Prize for an Exceptional Ph.D. Dissertation in History, University of Notre Dame (2006)
• Edward F. Sorin Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Notre Dame (2005-2006)
• Charlotte W. Newcombe Dissertation Fellowship, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation (2004-2005)

• Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
• “The Cruelty of Slavery, The Cruelty of Freedom: Colonization and the Politics of Humaneness in the Early Republic,” in Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770-1830, ed. Stephen Ahern (Farnham, England: Ashgate Press, 2013).
• “Antislavery and Proslavery,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, eds. Joan Shelley Rubin and Scott Casper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
• “‘A Humane Master – An Oblidging Neighbor – A True Philanthropist’: Slavery, Cruelty, and Moral Philosophy,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 66 (Spring 2005* [2009]): 493-512.
• “Apologetics of Harmony: Mathew Carey and the Rhetoric of Religious Liberty,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 134 (January 2010): 5-30.