I am both a scholar and public historian committed to rigorous research and engaging story-telling.

As a scholar, I approach the past with an interdisciplinary method and expansive outlook, incorporating a wide array of fields and disciplines from archaeology and architecture to art history and material culture to oenology and botany. My award-winning book, This Is Our Home: Slavery and Struggle on Southern Plantations (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), illuminates how enslaved people across the plantation South used material culture and the built environment in their struggle to transform sites of forced occupation and exploitation into homes. This Is Our Home has won the 2023 James Broussard Best First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the 2024 Ramirez Family Award for Most Significant Scholarly Work from the Texas Institute of Letters, as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2024 Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians.

I am now at work on two book projects. The first, The Story of Texas: History-Making at Varner-Hogg Plantation, continues my dedication to place-based histories of slavery by telling the 200-plus year history of our massive state at the micro-scale of a single plantation. The second, Bitter Vines: Wine and Slavery in the United States, will be the first book to uncover how unfree labor planted the roots of the American wine industry. From Revolution to Reconstruction, Americans dreamed about how to make and profit from wine using bound workers, in the process spreading themselves and their vine cuttings from the slave states to the nominally free land of California.

I am dedicated to doing history with and in the public. I meet audiences where they are through traditional means like articles and essays, school curricula, curated exhibits, and presentations at museums, historic sites, and libraries, as well as through digital portals like podcasts, websites, and video content. I have cultivated skills of leadership, collaboration, and adaptability by directing teams of staff, volunteers, and students; chairing committees on research and interpretation; conducting national and regional history audits; and working with guides and educators on audience engagement.

I’m a proud alumna of Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, the University of St. Thomas, and Rice University, where I received my PhD in History in 2017. Since then I have been at the University of Texas at Dallas, where I am an associate professor of history and faculty in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History. I could not give up working in museums and public history, though, and so consult and volunteer with local, state, and national organizations like the Texas Department of Transportation and the National Parks Service. I am also chair or member of committees on membership, fundraising and development, and programming for major historical associations. Additionally, I hold a Level 2 certificate in wine from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust.

Learn out more about my work through my academic C.V. or résumé. And please contact me with any questions, comments, or opportunities!