MyResearch
Trained as an Environmental Historian, my work explores the intersection of race, economic inequality, and environment in the 19th-century U.S. South, bridging the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction periods.
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I borrow heavily from the natural sciences, geography, and environmental sociology to reframe the big questions of nineteenth-century southern history: slavery as capitalism, the impacts of the Civil War and emancipation on southern agriculture, economic stagnation in the shadow of “King Cotton,” and, more recently, the twin processes of industrialization and urbanization.
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Future research will connect the narrative of the rural South in the Civil War era to that of the urbanizing, industrializing South. Examining the iterative process of environmental racism over the course of the century, this project investigates the role played by pollution in racializing urban spaces, reinforcing
disenfranchisement, creating racially segmented economies, and furthering environmental degradation.
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I finished my Ph.D. with distinction in 2014 at Georgetown University, and my dissertation, "Unredeemed Land: The U.S. Civil War, Changing Land Use Practices, and the Environmental Limitations of Agriculture in the South, 1840-1880," won the Harold N. Glassman Award for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. The manuscript version is under contract with Oxford University Press, due out in October 2018.
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19th-Century Environmental and Agricultural History
RESEARCH INTERESTS
EDUCATION
2014
Georgetown University
Ph.D., with distinction, Environmental History
African Americans in the U.S. South
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2010
Georgetown University
M.A., History (comps fields: U.S. History, Environmental History, Atlantic World, Environmental Science)
War and Society
Urban Studies
2007
Samford University
B.A., summa cum laude, History and Biology
Environmental Studies
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