My research interests include slavery, race, and the law; abolitionism and emancipation; and memory and public history. The central questions that guide my research agenda are how ordinary people thought about race, social status, and political mobilization in slave and post-slave societies, and how such popular ideologies and actions mattered within larger political economic systems. My research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association through the Conference on Latin American History, and the University of Michigan.
