Scholarship and Biography
I am a historian of the 19th-century United States, with a focus on the history of political economy, colonialism, and the Indigenous peoples of North America. At Brandeis, I teach courses on early America, Indigenous History, and the history of American capitalism.
My book Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States, published by Princeton University Press, examines how the federal government became both dispossessor of and trustee to the continent's first peoples. It argues that federal trusteeship, often cast as a benevolent practice, in fact advanced an imperial strategy named "fiduciary colonialism": a form of territorial acquisition and population management carried out through the expansion of administrative control over Indigenous wealth. Research for this project has drawn support from the American Council for Learned Societies, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the John E. Rovensky Fellowship for Business and Economic History. Articles drawn from my book manuscript research have appeared in the American Historical Review, Journal of the Early Republic, and William and Mary Quarterly.
I'm also interested in the shifting relationships between taxation, citizenship, and Indigenous sovereignty in the 19th-century United States. My second book project will examine the implications of Indigenous nations’ longstanding immunity to colonial taxation, as enshrined by their exclusion from political representation in the United States Constitution as “Indians not taxed.”
In Spring 2023, students in my class HIST124B: Universities and Colonialism produced a history toolkit to guide users interested in writing a land acknowledgement for Brandeis' campus. You can check it out here.