I am a historian and material culture scholar of the United States. My research, teaching, and museum work focus on United States history, material culture, race, gender, military history, and the politics of everyday life in the nineteenth century.

My new book, A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era (Univ. of North Carolina Press), is a material history of war. During the American Civil War, clothing became central to the ways people waged war and experienced its cost. Through the clothes they made, wore, mended, lost, and stole, Americans expressed their allegiances, showed their love, confronted their social and economic challenges, subverted expectations, and, ultimately, preserved their history. As the collections they left behind make clear, Civil War Americans believed clothing was not merely a reflection of one’s class, gender, race, military rank, political ideology, or taste. Instead, Northerners and Southerners alike understood that clothing—from the weave of a fabric to the style and make of a coat—had the power to affect people’s way of living through the war’s tumult.

I am currently the Executive Director of the American Historical Association, where I also direct the NEH-funded project “Teaching Things: Material Culture in the History Classroom.” I previously worked at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where I co-curated Really BIG Money with Ellen Feingold, Abby Pfisterer, and Orlando Serrano Jr, and  Who Pays for Education? with Amanda Moniz. I was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wolf Humanities Center.

I was awarded my PhD with Distinction in History by the Department of History at the University of Chicago. I earned an MA in American Material Culture from the Winterthur Program at the University of Delaware, and a BA with Distinction in History from Yale University.