Biography
I am a historian of the 19th and 20th century United States, with a focus on the culture and politics of the U.S. South. I am the author of Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865-1915.
Research
My book project, titled The Ballad of Robert Charles: Race, Violence, and Memory in the Jim Crow South, explores the New Orleans race riot of July 1900. When a black man named Robert Charles killed several white police officers, white residents of New Orleans sought revenge. Over several days of rioting, they injured dozens of African Americans and killed at least five. The riot quickly became a national and international story, as commentators attempted to shape popular understandings of events in New Orleans. Because so little was known about Robert Charles prior to July 1900, he proved an ideal vessel for larger conversations about race, citizenship, power, and violence. For this reason, the Robert Charles riot offers historians an important vantage from which to consider both the intellectual work of turn-of-the-century white supremacy and African American strategies of cultural resistance. More generally, the story presents an extraordinary canvas on which to study the possibilities and limits of the historical imagination. The Ballad of Robert Charles will be published by the University of North Carolina Press.
