About

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Hello! I’m a cultural historian who specializes in US racial formation since the nineteenth century. I research race through several thematic lenses, including childhood, theatre, and performance studies. A graduate of Yale’s doctoral program in American Studies, I now teach at Harvard in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Program in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. I also chair Harvard’s doctoral program in American Studies. With Stephanie Batiste and Brian Herrera, I co-edit the NYU Press book series Performance and American Cultures.

My new book, Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, was just published by the University of Chicago Press. This book exposes the true origins of profit-driven incarceration—not in the South after the Civil War, as many assume, but instead in the North half a century earlier. I tell this story through the life of one young Afro-Native man named William Freeman. When he was fifteen years old, Freeman was incarcerated in the Auburn State Prison, which was world-famous for innovating the idea that a prison could and should be an economic engine. Forced to work for no pay in prison factories, Freeman rebelled—with effects that reverberate into our own day. See what Angela Y. Davis, Tiya Miles, Ibram X. Kendi, Heather Ann Thompson, Elizabeth Hinton, and Caleb Smith say about Freeman’s Challenge. I wrote this book with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

My previous book, Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, won five awards: the Outstanding Book Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (co-winner), the Grace Abbott Best Book Award from the Society for the History of Children and Youth, the Book Award from the Children's Literature Association, the Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and the IRSCL Award from the International Research Society for Children's Literature.  Racial Innocence was also a runner-up for the American Studies Association's John Hope Franklin Publication Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Book Award from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. My other books include the anthology Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater (University of Michigan Press) and a Jewish feminist children's book titled Terrible, Terrible! 

I recently published the forgotten 1897 slave narrative of Jane Clark, who liberated herself from slavery in Maryland by undergoing an arduous three-year journey that ended in Auburn, New York in 1859. The full text of the narrative (which was penned by a white amanuensis), along with my annotations and an introduction that verifies and contextualizes Jane Clark's story, was published in Common-place, an online journal of accessible history for lay readers. I also write opinion pieces, including op-eds and academic advice. The New York Times published my op-ed "Let Black Kids Just Be Kids," and Harvard Magazine published "Being Alive Together: Stephen Sondheim, Omicron, and the Power of Theater." I publish academic advice columns in Chronicle of Higher Education, including "The Art of ‘No,’" "Can You Reverse a Defeatist Habit that Sabotages Your Writing?" "You are Not a Public Utility," "How to Talk to Famous Professors," and "Banish the Smarm: Effective Networking is Sincere, Deep, and Generous."

As a teacher, I have been honored to receive a Harvard College Professorship, which recognizes “particularly distinguished contributions to undergraduate teaching and to creating a positive influence in the culture of teaching in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” In 2021, I received the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award, an honor conferred by the Graduate Student Council at Harvard University.