A student of the past, I recently finished my dissertation, a history of the idea of a person in the United States. It is a fascinating and very strange story. Make no mistake, the dead do return to us.

I entered Harvard after completing a BA at Vanderbilt and MPhil at Oxford. At the former, I met my mentor and friend, Colin Dayan, whose work continues to powerfully shape my own. At the latter, I studied with Andrew Ashworth to write a thesis arguing that the defendant's dock is a rights issue. Here at Harvard, I have the chance to look for answers to questions that matter to me, and the opportunity astonishes me still. For teaching me how to find the past, and what to say about the discovery, I’m in the mighty debt of my supervisor, Jill Lepore.

After depositing my dissertation in January 2018, I joined the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University as a postdoctoral associate. For the 2018-2019 academic year, I will be a research associate of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.