I am currently a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, and recently received my Ph.D. in English from Harvard University. My research interests lie at the intersection of nineteenth-century American literature and legal, economic, and political history.

My current book project, ‘Opening New Channels: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of Commerce’, examines the intertwined growth of American literature and the American market. My second book project, ‘I Will Be Heard: Abolitionism and the Birth of Free Speech,’ will excavate the antislavery movement’s largely forgotten influence on the development of American free speech doctrine.

I previously earned a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College, where I was valedictorian of the Class of 2009, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. I worked as a law clerk at the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and practiced appellate and corporate litigation in Boston before returning to academia.

My current book project, “Opening New Channels: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Law of Commerce,” argues that antebellum American authors and jurists jointly delineated the boundaries of an expanding marketplace. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed both the birth of a distinctly American literature and the integration of local economies into a national market under the sway of an increasingly powerful federal government. Collectively described by economic and legal historians as the “market revolution,” these events—industrial and infrastructural advancement in the Northern states, economic interconnection, and political centralization—are at once reflected in and refracted by the works of writers including Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Henry David Thoreau.

In a further juxtaposition of legal and literary history, my second book, “I Will Be Heard: Abolitionism and the Birth of Free Speech,” will examine how antislavery writers and activists including Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, and William Lloyd Garrison responded to government censorship and mob violence by developing a robust theory and praxis of free expression and assembly—an extralegal free-speech tradition that was ultimately absorbed into judicial interpretations of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.