About Me

As assistant professor of history at Colgate University, I research women, girlhood, and religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America, and the role of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in developing campus histories and public history sites and curricula. At present, I am working on my book manuscript, which argues for the centrality of young women’s narratives in nineteenth-century U.S. Catholic history, and related projects that take seriously artifacts of Catholic girlhood and the traces left on the land and in the archives by nineteenth-century convent academies. My research has been supported by the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School, the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and Colgate’s Upstate Institute.

Prior to joining the Colgate faculty, I taught courses in U.S. history and gender and sexuality studies at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois-Chicago, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I earned a B.A. from Barnard College and an A.M. and Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of Chicago.

As the CLIR Fellow and Director of Bryn Mawr College’s Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education from 2014-2016, my work focused on the digital possibilities of women’s and gender history research and pedagogy, and the development of college archives to better document contemporary and diverse histories. I advised the award-winning undergraduate public history project Black at Bryn Mawr and co-organized the National Council on Public History working group on campus histories during 2015-2016.

I have been involved in a number of other public projects that make history more accessible to a wider audiences — interests that grew out of my work at the Museum of the City of New York from 2001-2004, and that I later pursued as a coordinator for exhibition and oral history projects at Chicago’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality from 2007-2014.