About

I am a historian of the modern United States and Associate Professor of History at Lake Forest College. I am interested in the history of work, schools, and labor markets, and how these institutions structure social inequality. My first book, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston, was published with Harvard University Press in 2021, and explores how schools became central job-training institutions in the early 20th century, in the process becoming a new foundation for social inequality. My second project, Latina Migrants and the Remaking of Chicagoland Manufacturing, explores the making of a new, contingent manufacturing workforce in Chicagoland in the post-1970s era of deindustrialization, relying largely on undocumented women migrants from Mexico and Central America. While my first book relies heavily on the use of quantitative historical census data (and I am passionate about popularizing quantitative methods within the historical discipline), my next project relies on oral histories as a primary source base. My research has been funded by the National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation, and published in the History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of Urban History, and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

I teach courses in modern U.S. history on topics including urban history, the history of education, immigration and migration, Latinx history, gender and sexuality, labor, social movements, and historical methods including quantitative methods and oral history. I grew up in Boston and received an A.B. from Harvard College in 2008 with a concentration in Social Studies. Before beginning graduate school, I was a high school history teacher in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 2011 I received an MPhil in Political Thought from the University of Cambridge and completed a PhD in History at Harvard University in 2017. I now I live in the city of Chicago with my partner and two sons. In my spare time, I organize with the Chicago Democratic Socialists of America.