Welcome

I am a historian at Williams College, located in the homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican Community.

My scholarship, teaching, and public humanities work is grounded in the Native Northeast, and shaped by communities’ continuous commitments to care for cultural heritage, knowledge, and lands and waters. My work also reckons with the impacts of colonization, and the strategies Indigenous people and sovereign nations have long used to resist erasure and dispossession.

My writing has appeared in Native American and Indigenous Studies, The Journal of American History, The William and Mary Quarterly, New England Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. I regularly collaborate with libraries, archives, museums, historical societies, and other cultural sites across the Northeast/New England.

My book Memory Lands was published by Yale University Press in the Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity (Jan. 2018). It has been awarded the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians book award, the Peter J. Gomes Memorial book prize from the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Lois P. Rudnick book prize from the New England American Studies Association, and Honorable Mention for the National Council on Public History book award.

Author events and book talks, some with video, are accessible on this page.

I am completing a second book, titled The Itineraries: Families and Freedom Journeys in the Revolutionary Northeast, under contract with Yale University Press (publication anticipated in 2026). The Itineraries illuminates the intertwined lives of Indigenous, African-American, and Euro-colonial people in the eighteenth-century Northeast, including tumultuous years of the American Revolution.   Offering a dynamic, nuanced retelling of this seemingly familiar era, it follows the stories of individuals, families, communities, and sovereign nations who pursued distinctive understandings of liberation, independence, and thriving futures. 

Freedom-seekers like the African-American family of Newport, Violet, and their son Jacob Freeman, and the Native American (Nehantic) family of Ruth and her son Aaron Waukeet, sought to maintain family integrity, stability in cherished places, spiritual and cultural self-determination, and other priorities.  Simultaneously they reckoned with rapid, stressful shifts, not least of the searing violences and displacements of the American Revolutionary War, and emergence of the United States of America.  These families also entered relations with and contended with Ezra Stiles, the prominent colonial minister and later President of Yale College, whose own family enslaved, indentured, and dispossessed over many decades, while also opening windows to certain opportunities and interdependent ties spanning generations. 

As an interdisciplinary social and cultural history, The Itineraries recovers previously hidden or under-recognized routes of mobility, resistance, and strategic adaptation from Narragansett Bay to the Piscataqua River, to the streetscapes of New Haven and Newport.   This is not a story narrowly told about the eighteenth century, either.  The Itineraries spotlights the enduring impacts of these interactions in the twenty-first century.  As community members have long attested, these pasts continue to reverberate and shape everyday lives, politics, material conditions, and public histories.