There is a rich and complex story of intellectual property in the United States that predates AI, Mickey Mouse and even Wheaton v. Peters. Incredible scholars show the importance of IP in a wide range of legal, literary, and bibliographic research, but there has not yet been a book-length treatment of the relationship between copyright and government in colonial North America and early national United States. The history of that relationship is the subject of my new book, The Engine of Free Expression: Copyright and the State in Early America.

Copyright and the State will be published in December of 2026 with the University of Pennsylvania Press, and please reach out if you are interested in learning more about it! For some brief background: Copyright and the State won the 2018 Society for the History of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Dissertation Prize, and was a finalist for the Zuckerman Prize in American Studies. I was able to revise my dissertation into a book thanks to the support of the The Huntington Library Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, where I was a Barbara Thom post-doctoral fellow during the 2020—2021 academic year. I was able to finish the revision process thanks to fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy, the William Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the Bright Institute, and the George Washington Presidential Library.

In Copyright and State, I argue that copyright was both a tool and product of state formation in the long eighteenth century, a process that I describe as “copyrighting the state.” I study how claims to textual property, especially those involving maps and geographic expressions, were a part of the contested development of individual, local, federal, and transnational authority in early America. I'm deeply interested in how understandings about the ownership of land and labor — from both established authors and those frequently excluded from traditional positions of power — connected to shifting views on libel, sedition, and authority. Put another way, what do we mean when we say free expression: free as in uncensored, and free as in not paid for?

Copyright and State is an example of my broader scholarship in the interconnected histories of communication and media, political economy, and legal culture across chronological boundaries. Drawing on these themes, I published an article in the Law and History Review on geographer Lewis Evans and the formation of copyright consciousness in the mid-eighteenth century Atlantic world, available here. “‘To Save the Benefit of the Act of Parliament’: Mapping an Early American Copyright” was a finalist for the 2024 Anne Fleming Article Prize from the Business History Conference and the American Society for Legal History. With Dr. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold of the University of Glasgow I also co-authored an article, ““Leading dual lives, even literarily”: Voice, Visibility, and Ghostwriting in the Sweet Valley Franchise” in a special issue of the Journal of Popular Romance Studies with Dr. Melanie Ramdarshan Bold of the University of Glasgow on ghostwriting and the Sweet Valley franchise. This essay is the start of a larger project on YA fiction, ghostwriting, and IP in twentieth-century book packaging. I also recently published a chapter on “Law and Property” in the Cambridge History of the American Revolution, and am finalizing on an essay on copyright and AI in early American studies for the journal, Early American Studies.

Thanks to support from the American Philosophical Society and the British Academy, I have also been at work on two projects, one involving the gendered patent pursuits of Sybilla Righton Masters, and the other on Frances Hargrave, the British copyright and anti-slavery attorney, whose library provides a unique lens into the relationship between reading, writing, book collecting, and mental health. Strechtching back to my MA thesis, I am also interested in pursuing The Crystallization of Public Opinion: Alexander Hamilton, Walter Lippmann, and The Regulation of Information, which will be a comparative account of the relationship between technology and government management of media from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. I also hope to return to an ongoing article on the connections between Germaine de Stael and Jane Austen’s historical writings, which I first presented in 2017, before too long!

Much like my focus on communication methods in the past, I am also fascinated by communication methods in the present! For my collaborative digital humanities projects, an interdisciplinary project on the circulation of William Blackstone's Commentaries and a co-edited volume with Cornell University Press, American Revolutions in the Digital Age, please check out the Digital + Public History section.

Teaching

In my experience, pedagogy and research are inseparable elements of being a historian: archives and classrooms are mutually reinforcing spaces and one cannot flourish without the other. This is a perspective I share with my students whenever possible, first at Hunter and Lehman Colleges, and now at Iona. By making primary source analysis and interdisciplinarity central to all of my courses, from global and American history surveys to seminars on the Age of Revolutions and intellectual property, students learn essential critical thinking tools for navigating their individual personal and professional growth as well as the complex world around them. Media and information literacy is essential for both intellectual and pre-professional development, and I firmly believe that history is a key discipline in honing these skills with our students in their many pursuits after university.

In my student-focused work at the ITPS, I’ve built on these principles to create a minor degree program in Digital Humanities and Public History, which emphasizes experiential learning, community internship partnerships, and civic engagement. Incorporating both public and digital history, historical memory, and the 250th anniversary of the American revolution, I have also served as lead scholar for the Gilder Lehrman and Pace University joint program (details available here) and as a faculty convener for the Osnabrück Summer Institute on Law, Language and Culture in Germany (details available here). For an example of my pedagogical approach in action, please check out my article in Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, “The Methodology is the Message: Citations, Sources, and Memory in Revolutionary Unessays” where I also now serve on the editorial board. I am especially excited to be collaborating with Dr. Rachel Noorda of Portland State University on the “pAIne” project: for more details, check out the Digital +Public History section.

C.V. and Further Details

My research is generously funded by the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where I also serve on the Advisory Council, the Mellon Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the New-York Historical, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Bright Institute at Knox College, among others. At Iona, I've received support from the Lapidus Initiative for Early American Inquiry, the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation and the Gabelli Center for Teaching and Learning Provost's AI Fellowship. My faculty page is available here.

I've been fortunate to work for a series of institutions and individuals as an event coordinator, media liaison, grant writer, and fundraiser. I am thrilled to be combining these experiences  in my public-facing role as the Director of the ITPS. For more about my role at the ITPS, including administrative and fundraising efforts, please check out the Digital + Public History section and the ITPS Research Portal. For a full list of peer-reviewed publications, fellowships, invited talks, conference presentations, and professional service, you can check out my curriculum vitae here.