There is a rich story of intellectual property in colonial and early national America that predates Mickey Mouse and even Wheaton v. Peters. Many wonderful scholars have demonstrated the importance of IP in a wide range of legal, literary, and bibliographic scholarship, however there has not yet been a book-length treatment of the political origins of copyright in the colonial and early national United States.

My forthcoming book, The Engine of Free Expression: Copyrighting the State in Early America, 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 am extremely grateful to The Huntington Library Art Museum and Botanical Gardens for supporting Copyrighting the State as a Barbara Thom post-doctoral fellow during the 2020—2021 academic year. In Copyrighting the State, I argue that copyright was both a tool and product of state formation in the long eighteenth century. In this book, I study how textual property disputes, especially those involving maps and geographic expressions, featured in 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?

More broadly, I study interconnected histories of communication, political economy, and legal culture. With these themes in mind, I recently published an article on Lewis Evans and early tensions over copyright and sovereignty in the Law and History Review, 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. I’m currently co-authoring an article 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 (which has been a LOT of fun). I'm also thinking ahead towards my second book, tentatively titled Knock Off: Intellectual Property and Appropriation. I am also interesting in pursuing the project 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. 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 forthcoming 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).

C.V. and Further Details

My research is generously funded by the Huntington Library, 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 Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Bright Institute at Knox College, among others. At Iona, I've received support from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation and the Provost's Office for Strategic Initiatives. 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. For a full list of peer-reviewed publications, fellowships, invited talks, conference presentations, and professional service, you can check out my curriculum vitae here.