My teaching aims to expand the scope of history, engage students in its ongoing consequences, and empower them to effect positive change. I highlight a wide array of voices in United States history, encouraging students to use interdisciplinary methods to better analyze the nation’s past from multiple points of view in order to tell bigger, better, and more nuanced stories that reflect the complexity of history and its reverberations.

​Because students learn history best when they understand how the past shapes the world around them, I emphasize that they also have the opportunity to intervene in ongoing social, political, economic, and cultural processes. I have put these principles into practice as I have designed and taught seven different courses, for undergraduate and graduate students, on a variety of topics, including nineteenth-century U.S. history (early America and the Civil War), African American slavery and freedom, the history of capitalism, urban history, and historical memory.

Please see the Trinity and Slavery Project website for an example of how my teaching draws together historical education with contemporary significance and public engagement. 

LIST OF COURSES TAUGHT 

Baruch College, CUNY, Department of History
Modern American History
African American History

The New School, Department of History
Race, Property, and Capitalism (Fall 2019)
The History of New York City and Its Neighborhoods (Spring 2020)
 
Trinity College, American Studies Program 
The History of Race and Property in Early America (Spring 2018)
Slavery and Freedom in the American Atlantic (Spring 2017)
Civil War and Reconstruction (Spring 2019, Fall 2017, Fall 2016)
New York and its Neighborhoods (Fall 2018, Fall 2017, Spring 2017)
Conflicts and Cultures in American Society (Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Spring 2018, Fall 2016)
Popular Narratives of American History (Spring 2018, Spring 2017)
History and Memory of Slavery at Trinity (Spring 2019)
 
New York University, Department of History
History 101: Constructing Identities in Urban America, Adjunct Instructor (Fall 2014)
New York and its Neighborhoods, Adjunct Instructor (Summer 2015)
Black Women in America, Course Assistant (Fall 2012)

Hamden Hall Country Day School, Department of History
North American and United States History
North American and United States History, Honors
Modern World History
A.P. United States Government
A.P. Comparative Government

INSIDE AND OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM​
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I center student participation through in-class discussions, combining historical content, methodology, and skill-building. My teaching grounds history in specific experiences and moments that illustrate larger historical themes and trends. This structure lets students engage with new concepts in concrete terms before zooming out to study their larger implications, pushing students to adopt a variety of perspectives, encouraging a nuanced understanding of historic events, and fostering the empathetic analysis that makes studying history so important.
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By combining public and digital humanities, I motivate students to build on those skills and carry the history we study in class beyond their desks. Even small project like updating wikipedia pages or outings to local historic sites can encourage students to see the historical legacies surrounding them and how small sources in their own lives can connect them to big stories.

SOURCES AND ASSIGNMENTS
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I employ primary sources to build a foundation of research skills and focused historical analysis, upon which I develop a broader secondary and historiographical discussion. Diverse sources demonstrate the breadth of historical voices and material used by scholars, encouraging students to turn a historian’s eye toward research materials and everyday relics of their world. Repeated use of this exercise—often in small breakout groups to empower students to take intellectual risks and prepare them to share their ideas with the class when it reconvenes—deepens students’ ability to ask historical questions and develop cogent arguments.
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To reinforce and assess the lessons learned through collective class discussion, I assign primary source essays that require students to select their own topics and dig deeply into their interests. While students become experts, I encourage them meet with me to explore their sources, project, and areas of academic interest. As students craft well-supported interpretive historical arguments, these assignments emphasize fundamental, and professionally portable, methodological skills in research and writing.

MENTORING AND ADVISING
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I have advised students’ learning plans and individual research projects. I have also mentored students from diverse backgrounds, who often seek me out to discuss how course materials relate to their own experiences of inequality inside and outside the class, and how I can best support them in class.
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To help students solidify the connection between the history they study and the issues of their contemporary world, I have also created an exercise in which students identify their own strengths, weaknesses, and goals in broadly applicable skills of historical research, analysis, and writing. Many find this early introspection difficult, but in consultation with me, they refine their goals and develop strategies for achieving them. This exercise encourages students to invest in scholarly advancement on their own terms, and creates openings for a diverse array of students to seek out advice and guidance.