麻豆精选

• H.BA, MA, PhD (University of Toronto)

I did my graduate work at the University of Toronto before taking up a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough (2014-15). I joined the School of History and Cultures at the University 麻豆精选 in the Autumn of 2015.

Year 2

• Mass Culture and the Modern United States, 1877-1922 (Option).
• Sources in History: Possessions.

Year 3

• History of Technology in the United States (Option).

I am happy to discuss research projects broadly based in 19th and early 20th century United States history.

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University 麻豆精选.

I began my career as a historian of the nineteenth century U.S. South, examining the ways white and Black southerners engaged with the question of what a modern and imperial future of the region would look like through the imaginative spaces of World鈥檚 Fairs. Since the completion of the project in 2018, I have shifted my attention to national and global histories of technology and mobility within the field of U.S. foreign relations. Ultimately, my research explores the cultural dynamics of race and empire in the shaping of American modernity.

Past Research: A Dream of the Future: Race, Empire and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville World鈥檚 Fairs (Oxford University Press, 2018).

My considered the ways white and Black southerners promoted their region in an age of empire. In the late nineteenth century, southerners mobilized the Atlanta and Nashville world鈥檚 fairs to challenge popular images of the region as backward and agrarian. In doing so, they presented their own image of what a future and imperial South could be. Significantly, the Atlanta and Nashville fairs featured Black-run exhibits to which clerical and professional members of the local and national community rallied as a way to both challenge and accommodate Jim Crow. A chapter of the book was first published in the Journal of Southern History as 鈥溾�� (2014). The book received positive reviews in major journals, including the American Historical Review, Journal of Southern History, and the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

In 2017, I published an article on convict labour in Louisiana following the Civil War in Louisiana History. 鈥溾��: Louisiana鈥檚 Convict Lease, 1865-1901鈥� has been cited not only in the new histories of the carceral state but has informed work on the health of Louisiana鈥檚 contemporary prison population.

Current Research: The World Awheel: Americans in the First Global Bicycle Age, 1885-1920 (Columbia University Press).

My current research addresses contemporary needs for a fuller and wider understanding of the historical relationship between active mobility and the politics that shape our lives. Situating the first U.S. bicycle boom within a global framework, it reveals the ways in which inequalities rooted in empire were not separate from but mutually constitutive of American technology and culture.

The World Awheel argues that the bicycle and its social and cultural worlds provide us with a grounded way to understand Americans鈥� experience and understanding of the world at the very moment the nation shifted from a continental settler empire to an overseas and imperial one. It highlights the ways that Americans understood themselves as in this world and the ways that the forces of empire both produced and influenced these outlooks at the exact juncture of the local, national, and global. With mass automobility only taking off after the First World War, the book asks how the bicycle鈥攖he most significant global technology of personal mobility during the key decades of the United States鈥� rise as an industrial and imperial power鈥攊nfluenced and shaped Americans鈥� experience and understanding of the world.

I have published three articles related to the current book project that bridge my past and current research. 鈥�: Race, Technology, and Bicycle Mobilities in the Early Jim Crow South, 1887-1905鈥� was published in Technology & Culture (2021). It argues that historians must look at technological solidification from the perspective of race to fully understand its social and cultural articulations. 鈥�: The Bicycle in the New South, 1887-1920,鈥� in the Journal of American Studies (2022) contends that the history of the bicycle in the New South can better reveal the ways the region was embedded in and not separated from the world at the end of the nineteenth century. A in the Journal of Sport History follows the emergence and elaboration of cycling as a global sporting culture, casting light on how the sport was experienced across and between spaces that challenge notions of coherent 鈥渘ationality and territoriality鈥� in the crucial decade before the First World War.

As an immensely popular technology, then and now, this project has afforded ample opportunities to engage with the public through newspaper articles, public talks, and events. I have published in The Washington Post鈥檚 鈥淢ade by History鈥� series on the legacies of Jim Crow on mobility (2021); used an artefact from Birmingham鈥檚 Science and Technology Museum to write an accessible history of technological adaptation that highlights the city鈥檚 deep connection to the British Empire (2023); and mobilised an archive of unpublished photographs to for Black Perspectives (2023). In 2024, I partnered with the BMT鈥檚 curator of science and technology on an AHRC impact fund to produce people-focussed histories of mobility that offers a roadmap for a sustainable future. The project resulted in a small exhibition accompanied by an accessible talk on the history of the bicycle in Birmingham. So far, over 50,000 visitors have viewed the exhibition. I have given public talks on the 鈥淐rises of Car Culture in 21^st Century Birmingham,鈥� and the history 麻豆精选 as a city of innovation.