Research & Teaching

Research: My work focuses primarily on the history of American political and cultural thought, especially the development and uses of concepts such as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism, and anarchism. My dissertation studied anti-democratic thought in American history since the Civil War, drawing connections between the anti-democratic views of William Graham Sumner, Emma Goldman, Albert Jay Nock, H.L. Mencken, Ayn Rand, and Murray Rothbard. I am currently in the process of developing a book proposal for a monograph tentatively titled “Empire of the Majority”: An Intellectual History of American Anti-Democratic Thought since the Civil War. In the future, I would like to go further back in time to look at American anti-democratic thought between colonialism and the Civil War, especially during and immediately following the Revolutionary Era.

I’m also interested in the intersection of intellectual history and political theory, especially its implications for American Christianity. Another book project (one day) would be to combine history and philosophy for a sort of manifesto on modern-day Christian political theory, focusing on concepts like authority, political legitimacy, obedience, dissent, and democracy.

Teaching: The Gilded Age and Progressive Era; Contemporary America; History of Political Thought; History of Slavery in the US; Long Civil Rights Movement; American History to 1877; American History since 1877; History Teaching Methods; Historiography; Introduction to Liberal Arts (honors); American Government; Major Issues in Philosophy