Department of History

I am a historian of vast early America. My current book project, Trading Women: Race, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in the Hudson River Watershed, 1600–1780, analyzes entangled kinship and trade networks of the present-day Hudson River Valley over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I am especially interested in the ways in which Native, African, and European women exercised economic and political power as traders, merchants, and business owners, and how their commercial and productive activities were central to the long process of colonization. To bring to the fore women’s experience, my research braids together Dutch, English, and French colonial archives with archaeology, ethnography, and Native American oral tradition. Further, it situates its arguments within the dynamic historical scholarship of Native America, early modern women’s labor, and the Atlantic World.  

I was the New Netherland Institute’s Scholar in Residence, held Indiana University’s Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies Fellowship, and have received research support from the American Historical Association. My teaching experience includes undergraduate history courses on Native American history, the American Revolution, U.S. History, and women and gender history.