Public History
I believe the study of the past can help guide the fight for racial and economic justice today. In order for that to work, however, history needs to be a democratic undertaking—consumed, challenged, and mobilized by people outside academia. To that end, I've taken part in a number of public history projects over the past few years.
Current Project
In 2025, I am working with Professor Nik Ribianszky of Queen's University Belfast to research Irish-born residents of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Natchez, Mississippi. Our aim is to build a free-to-use online database tracing multiple generations of transatlantic migration. By providing intimate portraits of hundreds of Irish Americans ranging from slaveholders to overseers to free workers who opposed bondage, the database will enable scholars and members of the public to understand better the connections between U.S. slavery and the British Isles—connections at the foundation of so many modern institutions.
Prior to coming to Belfast, I was part of a team helping to develop the Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy, an interpretive museum and educational center scheduled to open in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 2026. Housed in the old law office and home of the leading Radical Republican Congressman and his longtime collaborator, the Stevens & Smith Center explicitly aims to draw lessons from the nineteenth-century struggle for emancipation and enfranchisement to inform contemporary progressive movements.