Education

Ph.D., University of Virginia

Fields and specialties

Nineteenth-century United States, locality and community, local history, U.S. in the world, religion

Selected publications and presentations

"President Lincoln and Locality: National Commitments and Local Involvements in the Civil War Era." Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, 2024.

Here and Everywhere Else: Small-Town Maine and the World (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2022)

• Winner of the 2023 New England Society Book Award (Historical Nonfiction category)
• Winner of the 2023 Award of Excellence for Publications (large press category), American Association for State and Local History

"Rural America after the Civil War." Lecture for C-SPAN's series "Lectures in History." Aired February 23, 2020.

"Objects of Faith: 3D Modeling and Printing U.S. Religious History," Material Religion, Vol. 15, No. 1 (February 2019): 115-18.

"Notes Toward a Values-Driven Framework for Digital Humanities Pedagogy" (with Seán McCarthy), Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Learning, Teaching, and Technology (March 2016).

"Agency, Race, and Christianity in the Strange Career of Daniel Flickinger Wilberforce," Church History, Vol. 83, No. 4 (December 2014): 884-923.

"Auguste Comte's Theory of History Crosses the Atlantic," in Charles T. Mathewes and Christopher McKnight Nichols, eds., Prophesies of Godlessness: Predictions of America's Imminent Secularization from the Puritans to the Present Day (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 95-112.

"Race, Religion, and Rebellion: Black and White Baptists in Albemarle County, Virginia during the Civil War," in Edward L. Ayers, Gary W. Gallagher, and Andrew J. Torget, eds., Crucible of the American Civil War: Virginia from Secession to Commemoration (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 136-64.

Fellowships

• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Penn Humanities Forum, University of Pennsylvania
• Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, University of Virginia