Excellence in Teaching Award, College of Liberal Arts.

I am an interdisciplinary historian of mental health and addiction in the United States. My scholarship draws on health humanities, disability studies, science and technology studies, and medical and legal history to study intersections of compulsion, mental capacity, legal personhood, and citizenship. I am especially interested in how medicolegal systems construct insane persons, habitual drunkards, and addicts as pathologized kinds of legal personhood and govern them across clinical, legal, and carceral spaces. Key aspects of this research are featured in articles published in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Law and History Review, Nursing Clio, and numerous published and forthcoming book chapters.

My first book, Habitual Drunkard: Compulsive Drinkers and the Dilemmas of Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century United States (under contract, Rutgers University Press), explains how the nineteenth-century American quest to define, detect, and discipline compulsive drinkers contributed to the construction of modern concepts of drug and alcohol addiction. Habitual drunkards faced governance as unfit citizens in guardianship cases, also known as conservatorship, asylum commitments, divorce suits, and life insurance screening and litigation. These gripping yet largely forgotten non-criminal contests relied on medical expertise to position inchoate physiological framings of compulsion as a key characteristic demarcating the habitual drunkard from the moderate drinker. Addressing medical, legal, social work, and criminal justice professionals as well as historians, Habitual Drunkard offers new perspectives on the history of addiction by demonstrating how the medicolegal governance of the “habitual drunkard” across clinical, legal, and carceral spaces anticipated the modern “addict.”

My teaching is centered on making historical knowledge accessible and relevant to students, scholars, and the public. I harness the power of writing, self-reflection, and collaborative learning to move beyond the memorization of names, events, and dates. Instead, I demonstrate that history is an active process of studying and interpreting historical documents and scholarship. I am deeply committed to creating welcoming and inclusive learning environments by assigning low-stakes, self-reflective writing tasks that allow students to engage with challenging new ideas without fear of "getting it wrong." I want students to leave my classroom with a greater appreciation for the complexity of historical analysis, sensitivity to silences and omissions in historical knowledge, and the ability to evaluate critically the reliability and significance of information. Ultimately, I strive to make historical knowledge accessible and relevant so that students become well-rounded, socially conscious citizens.

Courses:

HIST 150 U.S. History to 1876
HIST 201 Pandemics in U.S. History
HIST 344 Antebellum America
HIST 345 Civil War Era
HIST 380A5 Alcohol and Drugs in U.S. History
HONR 192 The Mind on Trial