I am a political and legal historian of the modern United States, with interests in infrastructure, statebuilding, and citizenship. My doctoral dissertation, “Remapping America: The Interstate Highway System and Infrastructural Governance in the Postwar United States,” examines how the construction of the interstate highway system demonstrated and reinforced the rising power of the mid twentieth-century administrative state. More than a transportation system, the interstates were a tool with which statebuilders blazed paths for federal agencies, concretizing non-electoral administrative authority and producing physical and governmental infrastructure insulated from democratic pressure. And that infrastructure produced far-reaching inequality: following communities challenging the interstates’ existence, my work traces legal and fiscal structures of the American state along fault lines of race, class, gender and sexuality, and environmental concern, illuminating the priorities of statebuilding and demarcating the boundaries of administrative justice in modern America.

During the 2020/21 academic year, I will hold the Eisenhower/Roberts Graduate Fellowship at the Eisenhower Institute. My work has also been supported by the Hagley Museum and Library, the Linda Hall Library, and the John R. Irwin ’06 Fellowship at Princeton. I have served as a teaching assistant for History 384: Gender and Sexuality in Modern America (Margot Canaday) and History 383: The United States, 1920-1974 (Kevin Kruse). I also co-teach a MOOC on the global history of capitalism (Princeton edX). My work has been published in Enterprise and Society, and I write for broader audiences with pieces recently in The Washington Post and other outlets.

I received an MA in History from Princeton in 2017, with general examination fields in US History 1860-Present (major), Environmental and Western US History (minor), and the History of Capitalism (minor). I received an AB summa cum laude in History from Cornell, and before entering the doctoral program at Princeton I worked as a researcher at Public Agenda, a civic engagement think tank in New York City.