Welcome

I am a historian at Williams College, located in ancestral and unceded 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.

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

I am presently writing a book titled The Itineraries: Knowledge, Sovereignty, and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast, under contract with Yale University Press. It traces the intertwined lives of Indigenous, African-American, and Euro-colonial people in the 18th century. The story illuminates how individuals, families, and communities in Revolutionary-era New England related, lived, labored, resisted, and organized in places like Newport, Rhode Island; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; New Haven, Connecticut.  It also follows 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. These pasts not only haunt the present. They provide maps to different ways of being, dwelling, and organizing for justice.