I am an associate professor in the Department of History and an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, where I specialize in the history of slavery, race, and law in early America. I am interested in changing understandings of what law is and who it is for. I approach the study of the law and slavery from the bottom up. Rather than focusing on statutes and appellate court decisions as conclusive expressions of law, I examine trial court records, church disciplinary hearings, and other local legal records that emphasize the role ordinary people played in shaping legal processes. My work has thus advanced understandings of what law is and who is it for. The early U.S. South offers an especially fruitful place for studying critically who defines law and rights, and to what purpose. Scholars often think about rights as something given or provided through nature or statute, but my research has shown that rights are more properly imagined as capacities claimed through rhetoric—including the rhetoric of those without formal power. This interest in the intersection between law and rights and race and rhetoric has led me from examining the world of legal “outsiders,” both black and white; to how property featured in the African American legal imaginary; and from there to the gritty world of lending and borrowing across the color line.


I am a 2022 laureate of the Dan David Prize, the world's largest prize for the study of history and "given in recognition of the winners' contribution to the study of the past and to support their future endeavors." 

In 2022-24, I will hold a Mellon New Directions fellowship and will be using it to work on my project, "The Stability of Fortunes: Black Americans and Finance in the Long Nineteenth Century." 

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