Introduction
I did my undergraduate education at Princeton University, where I graduated with an AB summa cum laude in History, followed by the University of Edinburgh (MSc) and The Johns Hopkins University (PhD). I have held or been awarded long-term Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities (twice), the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello in Charlottesville, Va., the Huntington Library in San Marino, Ca., and the Fulbright-Hays Program (UK), which funded my studies at Edinburgh.
Teaching
I teach early American and Atlantic history and the history of the early modern British Empire. I am currently chairing or serving on committees for a dozen PhD students at the University of New Hampshire. I have also served on PhD committees at Harvard, Stanford, William and Mary, and the University of Southern California.
Research
My scholarship focuses on the American Revolution, with an emphasis on the entangled history that the United States shared with the rest of the Americas and with Africa, Europe, and the wider world. My current book project, Peace and Independence (OUP), examines the least studied of the United States’ founding documents: the Anglo-American peace treaty that ended the American Revolutionary War. I am interested how the American quest to be accepted as a “treaty worthy” empire by Europe’s colonial powers shaped thinking about federalism, Native American treaty rights, and slavery and anti-slavery. My book Among the Powers of the Earth (2012) has been widely praised, including by Noam Chomsky in an editorial on U.S. foreign policy, and has been a key text in a US Supreme Court amicus brief on child slavery in Africa.
Selected publications
Peace and Independence: The Turbulent History of the United States’ Founding Treaty, Oxford University Press, in progress.
The Cambridge History of America and the World, vol 1, co-edited with Paul Mapp and Carla Gardina Pestana, Cambridge University Press, 2021.
Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire, Harvard University Press, 2012.