About

I am an Associate Professor of History in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia.  In my teaching and scholarship, I investigate slavery’s role in the long history of economic inequality in America, focusing on the 18th and 19th centuries.  My research explores the intersection of African American history, American economic history, and the history of American slavery.  Specifically, I look at slavery’s influence on the evolution of African American economic life.  My newest book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank, is the first book in 50 years to chronicle the rise and fall of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company.  Savings and Trust exposes how the failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America.  Savings and Trust was reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Christian Science Monitor, and Jacobin. It received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. Publisher’s Weekly named Savings and Trust one of the best nonfiction books of 2024.  Savings and Trust was a finalist for the Business History Conference’s Hagley Prize and was on the shortlist for the Mark Lynton History Prize.

My first book, Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (April 2021 on Columbia University Press, in the Columbia Series in the History of U.S. Capitalism), explores the economic lives of enslaved people, not as property or bonded laborers, but as active participants in their local economies.  Unfree Markets provides the fullest account to date of the strategies that enslaved people used to create their own networks of commerce, from the colonial period to the Civil War.  It confronts one of the most enduring questions in African American history and the history of American capitalism: How beneficial was capitalism to African Americans?  Through examining an array of archival records, from slaveholder account books to legislative petitions, Unfree Markets shows that even though enslaved people shaped the increasingly capitalist economy of slavery, economic participation alone could not secure what bondspeople wanted most—their freedom.  The time and energy that enslaved people invested in their own economic enterprises did not bring them out of slavery; instead, it kept them enslaved.  Ultimately, Unfree Markets demonstrates that the vestiges of race-based economic inequality are not in the late-nineteenth or twentieth centuries, but in the period of legal slavery.

I have been awarded a Carnegie Fellowship and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship.  I was the co-winner of the 2025 Harold F. Williamson Prize from the Business History Conference, for a mid-career scholar who has made significant contributions to the field of business history.  I was also awarded an inaugural Dean's Research Fellowship from the Dean of the College & Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at UVA.  

I received research support for this project from the Carnegie Corporation of New York as a 2022 Carnegie Fellow, the Mellon Foundation as a Mellon New Directions Fellow, and the Karsh Institution for Democracy at the University of Virginia. I was the co-winner of the 2025 Harold F. Williamson Prize from the Business History Conference, for a mid-career scholar who has made significant contributions to the field of business history.  I was also awarded an inaugural Dean's Research Fellowship from the Dean of the College & Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at UVA.    

I was also a Consortium Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and a Quin Morton Teaching Fellow in Princeton University’s Writing Center.  My dissertation, “’Felonious Transactions: The Legal Culture and Business Practices of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787-1860,” was a finalist for the C. Vann Woodward Prize from the South Historical Association, a finalist for the SHEAR Dissertation Prize from the Society for Historians on the Early American Republic, and a finalist for the Herman E. Krooss Dissertation Prize from the Business History Conference.

I currently serve on the Advisory Board for the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. I am a Trustee of the Midland School and I serve on the board of The Shockoe Institute. I am on the editorial boards of Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, and the University of Virginia Press.

I received my B.A. from Swarthmore College, M.A. from Florida International University, and Ph.D. from Princeton University.

For an updated CV, click here.