About

Welcome! I am an intellectual historian of American political and cultural thought, focusing on ideas about democracy and antidemocracy. Since 2022, I have been an Assistant Professor of History at Greenville University in southern Illinois. Before that my family and I lived in Dallas, Texas, where I finished graduate school and taught at a local community college. My wife and I live on the Illinois side of St. Louis and love spending time with our four young girls. When I’m not lost in books or finding new corners of local libraries and coffee shops, I enjoy playing basketball, gardening, and woodworking. And like Billy Bean, I’m still waiting to watch the Dallas Cowboys play the last game of the season.

I love American history, the history of political thought, and political philosophy and theory. One of the great parts of my job at GU is the ability to teach across disciplines, which reveals to me and (hopefully) my students the interconnectedness of ideas. As I tell my students, when approaching a topic from different disciplines, we’re looking at the same thing, but asking different questions. The historian might ask where or why democracy became popular, whereas the philosopher or theorist wants to know whether it’s a good system. But in studying and teaching multiple sides of these timeless topics, we give ourselves a more well-rounded answer, if one is to be found. C. Vann Woodward wrote that we should always remember history is for the quick and not the dead. To me, history is certainly not a boring record of names and dates, but rather the entire prologue to where we are and how we got here. It can’t in and of itself solve modern problems, but gives a window into the eternal relevance of the questions we ask.

My dissertation from UT-Dallas, defended in 2023, is titled “Anti-Democratic Thought in America Since the Civil War,” and was completed under the direction of Dr. Daniel Wickberg. Please email me to request a PDF! The project is an intellectual history covering the published work of six “anti-democrats”: William Graham Sumner, Emma Goldman, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. Some of these names are household within the academy, but others are not. My goal is to establish a counter-narrative to the story of American democracy: as I ask, “Where are the anti-democrats in the story of American democracy?” As my dissertation argues, while democracy has become a “way of life,” to quote the historian James Kloppenberg, its efficacy has been challenged at every turn. Even if not reviving the merits of anti-democratic thought, my dissertation is, hopefully, a correlative to the often unchallenged premises of American democracy. As each presidential election becomes more contentious, more costly, and more reminiscent of an “Age of Fracture,” we might reconsider what democracy is and does, and what it’s supposed to do.

My Ph.D. fields are in American intellectual history, modern political philosophy, and documentary film. In addition to studying ideas in historical context, I also want to consider their philosophical merit today. As intellectual history goes “free range,” I think this approach also demands we take more seriously the current impact of ideas— that we don’t study them in a vacuum. We not only need to know where ideas came from, but what cash value they hold today. What does it mean to be a “liberal” or a “conservative,” a “capitalist” or a “socialist”? As Richard Rorty once posed, what difference does Hegel make to a plumber? Of course, ideas do matter, and if we don’t want to be the “slaves of some defunct economist,” we would do well to study them. I agree with Dan Wickberg when he says, “All history must ultimately be the history of ideas because all historical documents are meaningful only in relation to human minds.”

I study, teach, and write about history, philosophy, Christianity, and politics. I’ve published in the Christian Libertarian Review, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and The Christian Scholars Review, and have a forthcoming chapter contribution to the second edition of The American Yawp (Stanford UP). I’ve also published essays for the Society for US Intellectual History, the Mises Institute, the Cato Institute, the Libertarian Christian Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Libertarian Institute.