I am a Ph.D. candidate broadly interested in wartime, conspiracy, and the politics of race and citizenship in the early twentieth-century United States.

My dissertation, “White Scare: The First World War and the Decade that Made Modern America, 1914-1923,” positions racial fear on the American home front at the intersection of multiple global dynamics, including Mexican and Indian revolutionary movements, German espionage, Pan-Africanism, transnational radicalism, and international tensions with Japan. It argues that the First World War and its aftermath reconstituted and ultimately cemented white supremacy by placing racially unequal understandings of loyalty at the heart of American citizenship. Encouraged by rapidly spreading conspiracy theories, many white Americans came to believe that minority groups shared an inherent propensity to foreign subversion and were actively collaborating with hostile foreign interests in pursuit of social improvement or equality. They not only renewed long-running arguments that citizenship should remain a prerogative of whiteness, but fueled a powerful postwar surge of racial violence, federal surveillance, immigration restriction, and white nationalist organizational activity. Overall, then, my project demonstrates how the essentialization of racial minorities as inherently prone to disloyalty progressively narrowed the definition, protections, and privileges of American citizenship along racial lines. This era’s novel articulation of white nationalism, predicated on security-focused and exclusionary claims to loyalty and national belonging, created a lasting conceptual pillar for white supremacist ideology that endures to this day.

I serve as co-editor, along with Bruno Cabanes, of an edited volume titled “Globalizing the History of the World Wars,” which is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press. The project applies the global turn to the early twentieth century’s two signature conflicts, emphasizing the broad diffusion of models of total war; the development of international law and transnational humanitarianism; colonial and racial encounters; and competing and contested processes of memory-making. I have contributed a chapter entitled “The Rising Tide of Color: Race, Global War, and the Remaking of American White Supremacy, 1915-1924.” 

My peer-reviewed work has appeared in Modern American History, The Journal of American Ethnic History, and 20 & 21: Revue d’histoire, a French journal of modern history. Shorter essays have been published in TIME magazine and the Washington Post. I have presented portions of my research in the U.S. and abroad, including at the meetings of the International Research Center of the Historial de la Grande Guerre (Europe’s leading institution for the study of the First World War), the American Historical Association, the Society for Military History, and the International Society for First World War Studies, among others.