Current Research
“English-Speaking Civil Wars”
In Fall 2022, I will deliver the Brose Lectures at the George and Ann Richards Civil War Center at Penn State. In recent years, historians have spent considerable energy beginning the process of contextualizing the US Civil War more fully in space. That is, we have labored to connect the experience in North America to the rest of the world. For the Brose Lecture Series, I plan to pursue a similar re-contextualization of the US Civil War in time. That is, instead of connecting the war horizontally to contemporaneous events around the globe, I will connect the war vertically through history. In particular, I propose to explore the connections between the US Civil War and the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century.
“Ways of War”
Co-Edited with Andrew Fialka
Both popular and academic histories of war continue to emphasize the symmetrical clash of regular armies within a handful of mostly modern conflicts even as historians of those conflicts demonstrate how much irregularity existed within them. The modern war landscape is dominated by asymmetrical conflicts.Given the rise of global and trans-national histories and the robust research into the irregular nature of historical conflicts, the time seems ripe for an analysis that brings together these various strands. We are editing a volume of essays exploring the irregular aspects of various nineteenth-century conflicts. Authors will respect the unique context of each conflict but also attend to the shared global environment – the rise of nation-states alongside a handful of still-powerful empires, new technologies of war, new communication mediums, global connectivity, and cultural factors like the emergence of scientific racism alongside ethnocentric “civilizational” justifications for many conflicts.
“Civil War America: New Directions “
Co-Edited with Caroline Janney and Peter Carmichael