Displacement and redevelopment may feel like natural elements of urban growth in America, but the landscapes and inequalities of our current urban model were invented, and challenged, throughout the nineteenth century. My research focuses on the overlapping histories of race, capitalism, and citizenship, centering marginalized historical actors to reorient our understanding of city life and urban development in the United States, now and in the nineteenth century.
My work integrates questions and methods of the history of race, urban history, the history of capitalism, environmental history, and historical memory, demonstrating how inequalities shaped diverse Americans’ abilities to navigate complex economic and social upheavals across the nation.
My work integrates questions and methods of the history of race, urban history, the history of capitalism, environmental history, and historical memory, demonstrating how inequalities shaped diverse Americans’ abilities to navigate complex economic and social upheavals across the nation.
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SENECA VILLAGE
My forthcoming (November, 2026) book, Seneca Village: A Story of Black Freedom and Manhattan Real Estate, showcases the ideas of freedom that underpinned this remarkable community, built in upper Manhattan with the intent to foster Black social, economic, and political advancement. Between 1825 and 1853, free African Americans bought land and built an innovative community that eventually included approximately 300 Black and white residents, three churches, two cemeteries, and a public school. Then, through the 1850s, New York City forcibly evicted the residents and destroyed all of the buildings, burying this thriving neighborhood under the landscape of the new Central Park. In this first book-length excavation of Seneca Village, I reconstruct the essential history of the community from the overlooked traces they left behind, focusing on the interconnected lives of Seneca Villagers and the daily work of liberation. Decades before the national reckoning of the Civil War and Reconstruction, they honed a vision of Black freedom on their own terms and fought to create space for themselves and each other, in a country that promised liberty for all but denied it to many. |
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All We Ask For Is Justice
In 1803, two landowning African American men in Wallingford, Connecticut registered themselves as freemen and voted in a local election for the Democratic party. They were met with a swift and devastating backlash first in the local press and then the state legislature. By 1814, the General Assembly of the House and Senate of Connecticut passed a law eliminating any possibility of Black suffrage, and in 1818 that law was enshrined in the state’s first constitution.African American men and women made similar assertions of citizenship, rights, and belonging with significant successes in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island until, one-by-one, each state rolled back those rights between 1807 and 1838. Still, those affected never gave up the struggle, creating a legacy of powerful activism and an enduring vision of a more equitable nation. Today, while the constitutionally protected rights of Americans are under direct and escalating assaults—with some populations more acutely targeted than others—a deep history of how Early American state legislatures and executives sought to weaponize new systems of American government to craft an ethnonationalist vision of democracy is more urgent than ever. So, too, is the story of how African American men and women proclaimed their citizenship in the face of white supremacy, organizing within their communities and bringing the fight directly to the steps of state houses throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic. My current book, tentatively titled “All We Ask for is Justice”: African American Rights and White Supremacist Backlash Before the Civil War, will build on the research and analysis of my prior work but expand the geographic scope and broaden the types of political involvement considered, emphasizing the overlapping movements for citizenship rights in Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island. The manuscript will highlight the particularities of each state and trace the people and ideas that moved across them, bringing each local story into a national conversation. |
CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
My work also engages with contemporary issues of race, urban space, and housing inequality today. I have conducted research for urban policy and housing rights organizations.
My work also engages with contemporary issues of race, urban space, and housing inequality today. I have conducted research for urban policy and housing rights organizations.