Teaching

Most students enter my courses having already felt history’s pressure: the uneven rhythm of progress and reaction, the promise of democracy shadowed by exclusion, the political life of a nation shaped still by struggles over memory, power, and belonging. As a historian of the United States, I teach students to recognize these tensions not as departures from the American story, but as dimensions of its rich and diverse narratives. The past is not a settled inheritance belonging to one side. It is a field of struggle, interpretation, and consequence.

I therefore teach history as foremost a discipline of inquiry, a method of interpretation, and a tool for regenerative civic imagination. In my courses, students learn to move between primary sources and historical context, between individual experience and structural force, and between narrative reconstruction and analysis. As a historian of antislavery and political thought in the U.S. and the Atlantic world, it is imperative that we understand the past as an active and unfinished script. In this spirit, I invite students to become rigorous readers of the evidence, disciplined producers of knowledge, critical interpreters of arguments, and reflective participants in the writing of this evolving script.

In the end, students will leave my classroom having developed the capacity to think historically—to question the what, explain the how, and be skeptical of easy certainties. I want them to embrace complexity, and understand the past as a living terrain of responsibility and possibilities.