Long before I became a graduate student, I was fascinated with the past. Growing up in Pennsylvania and its rich connections to early American history helped quite a bit. So too did my family, who I dragged to historic sites from a young age. Our trips to Gettysburg, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and countless other places furthered my interest in history. Including, my work at the Moravian Historical Society. I volunteered and worked there throughout high school and while I attended Moravian College, in historic Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. At Moravian, I earned my B.A. (2011) in History, summa cum laude with Honors.
After a year of working as an admissions counselor, moved in 2012. Two years later (2014), I completed my M.A. with a concentration in Nineteenth Century American and Public History. Over the next five years I worked through the Ph.D. program at WVU, taking a one year position during the 2018-2019 academic year at the University of West Georgia, where I taught courses on U.S. History, Public History, and led the Center for Public History's University History Project. Now I lived in Kentucky, working for the Kentucky Historical Society, on their ground-breaking Civil War Governors of Kentucky, Digital Documentary Edition.
During my graduate work I refined my research interests. In particular, my attention spans the cultural and social history of Americans during the long nineteenth century. My dissertation, "Breaking and Remaking the Mason-Dixon Line: Loyalty in Civil War America, 1850-1900," under the supervision of Dr. Jason Phillips, focuses on how Americans used loyalty as a lens to understand the tumultuous years surrounding the Civil War. Examining the Mid-Atlantic, in particular Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, I explore how a range of people--African and white Americans, Unionists and Confederates--used loyalty in their daily lives to understand, interpret, and remember the Civil War Era. As a result, my research is less about proving who was loyal and more about understanding how ordinary individuals produced their own, often conflicting, interpretations of loyalty.
In addition to my academic work, I am also a seasoned Public Historian. Beyond my concentration in Public History for my M.A. and PhD, I have also worked at the Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania National Military Park as an interpretative intern and at the Ford's Theatre Society, as a digital/educational intern. While at Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania, I designed and led my own tours of three Civil War battlefields: Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House. At Ford's Theatre, I worked on the award-winning Remembering Lincoln digital archive, as well as two of the education department's teacher workshops, "The Seat of War and Peace."
My experience as both an academic and public historian has shaped how I study the past. If recent controversies over the memory of the Civil War tell us anything, it is that Americans have developed rather divergent memories of their past. That result should not surprise us, but it should push historians to consider how best to engage such discordant memories. Having worked at battlefields, with the public, and inside academia, I think its essential to bridge the gap between academia and the public, sharing what our hours of hard work in the archives and behind computer screens has revealed to us. That sentiment has guided my work--in the classroom, as a public historian, and in my writing--to ensure that my work reaches a wide audience.
After a year of working as an admissions counselor, moved in 2012. Two years later (2014), I completed my M.A. with a concentration in Nineteenth Century American and Public History. Over the next five years I worked through the Ph.D. program at WVU, taking a one year position during the 2018-2019 academic year at the University of West Georgia, where I taught courses on U.S. History, Public History, and led the Center for Public History's University History Project. Now I lived in Kentucky, working for the Kentucky Historical Society, on their ground-breaking Civil War Governors of Kentucky, Digital Documentary Edition.
During my graduate work I refined my research interests. In particular, my attention spans the cultural and social history of Americans during the long nineteenth century. My dissertation, "Breaking and Remaking the Mason-Dixon Line: Loyalty in Civil War America, 1850-1900," under the supervision of Dr. Jason Phillips, focuses on how Americans used loyalty as a lens to understand the tumultuous years surrounding the Civil War. Examining the Mid-Atlantic, in particular Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia, I explore how a range of people--African and white Americans, Unionists and Confederates--used loyalty in their daily lives to understand, interpret, and remember the Civil War Era. As a result, my research is less about proving who was loyal and more about understanding how ordinary individuals produced their own, often conflicting, interpretations of loyalty.
In addition to my academic work, I am also a seasoned Public Historian. Beyond my concentration in Public History for my M.A. and PhD, I have also worked at the Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania National Military Park as an interpretative intern and at the Ford's Theatre Society, as a digital/educational intern. While at Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania, I designed and led my own tours of three Civil War battlefields: Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Court House. At Ford's Theatre, I worked on the award-winning Remembering Lincoln digital archive, as well as two of the education department's teacher workshops, "The Seat of War and Peace."
My experience as both an academic and public historian has shaped how I study the past. If recent controversies over the memory of the Civil War tell us anything, it is that Americans have developed rather divergent memories of their past. That result should not surprise us, but it should push historians to consider how best to engage such discordant memories. Having worked at battlefields, with the public, and inside academia, I think its essential to bridge the gap between academia and the public, sharing what our hours of hard work in the archives and behind computer screens has revealed to us. That sentiment has guided my work--in the classroom, as a public historian, and in my writing--to ensure that my work reaches a wide audience.