Bio

• B.A., Rutgers University, 2005M.A.,
• The College of William and Mary 2007

Conference Presentations: “Salvation to Monumentality: How Business and Culture Reshaped 19th-century American Burial Spaces,”

• Filson Historical Society Fellow, Louisville, KY, April 2010
• John E. Selby Graduate Teaching Award, College of William and Mary, 2009

• American Business History (with Charles McGovern)
• American History (Pre-Contact to 1815)  (with James Allegro)
• American History (1815- Present) (with Chandos Brown)
• Modern Japan (with Walter Skya) 

Dissertation: “Give up your dead: How Business, Technology, and Culture separated Americans from their dearly-departed, 1790-1930.”             

During the 19th century, Protestant, middle-class Americans gradually began to distance themselves from their dead. Much of this shift has been correctly attributed to cultural changes within the middle class. But culture alone does not explain how these Americans were able to move the corpse from the deathbed to the mortuary or from the graveyard to the burial park. It was only through the emergence of a death-care industry that these cultural shifts were realized in mahogany, mourning crepe, and granite. The unsentimental component of the death-care industry materialized cultural expectations but also shaped them.