I study native, settler, and slave histories of the early US South as well as the memory of slavery and dispossession more broadly. 

My dissertation, "Unsettling the South", argues that the Cotton Kingdom took shape within a changing American Indian South, in which the conflicts and contradictions produced by US settlement fractured both the United States and southern American Indian polities. My work also extends to the history and memory of slavery in New England. I co-wrote Harvard and Slavery: Seeking a Forgotten History with Sven Beckert and produced a website and video walking tour of Cambridge based on student research. Currently, I am organizing a public history project to explore Native and African enslavement in colonial New England through the history of the ship Desire. 

In the History and Literature Program at Harvard, I teach seminars, tutorials, and advise senior theses. I am also a swimmer, birdwatcher, and the founder and sole member of the Living Room Shakespeare Company.