I am the Robert S. French Professor of American Studies and Professor of History at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. In 2025, I became the inaugural director of Lawrence’s new Humanities Center. I’m also affiliated with Lawrence’s Environmental Studies Program (director 2016-2020). My teaching and research explore American cultural, intellectual, and environmental history in the early American period and the nineteenth century. I have a particular interest in the connections between gender studies and environmental studies, as well as public history and community-based teaching and learning.
I am the author of Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (Yale, 2013) and multiple articles and book reviews, including “Don’t Forget This: Annie Oakley and the ‘New Girl’ in Anglo-American Culture,” in The Popular Frontier: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Transnational Mass Culture, edited by Frank Christanson (Oklahoma, 2017). .
My research has been funded by fellowships from the Smith Library at Mount Vernon, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming. I am an inaugural fellow of the Bright Institute in American History at Knox College.
Born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was educated at the University of California, Berkeley and moved to the Midwest in 2001. I’m active in the Fox Cities as a member of the Northeastern Wisconsin Land Trust, the Outagamie County Democratic Party, and various other local initiatives. In 2014 I was recognized for my community work by being named one of the region’s “Future 15” emerging leaders. In 2018, the Outagamie County Historical Society presented the Lillian Mackesy Award for Local History to me in recognition of my nine years of service on the society’s board, including several terms as president.
