• PhD, University of Michigan, 1995
• BA, New York University, 1989, magna cum laude

HIS 162:  U.S. History II
HIS 379: African American History
HIS 306:  The City in American History
HIS 306:  Civil Rights in America
HIS 419: Race and the American City
HIS 459: American Utopias
HIS 503:  American History Core II
HIS 550:  The Long Civil Rights Movement

My current research examines the emergence of experimental interracial communities in mid-twentieth century America. These “interracial utopias” ranged from transient radical pacifist communities in cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., to rural communes that combined Christian pacifism with a commitment to racial equality. I am also researching the life of an African American pacifist and civil rights activist, Eroseanna Robinson.

Current C.V.

Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)

Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

“Radical Nonviolence, Interracial Utopias and the Congress of Racial Equality in the early Civil Rights Movement,” in The Journal of Civil and Human Rights, forthcoming

“Recreation and Race in the Postwar City: Buffalo’s 1956 Crystal Beach Riot,” Journal of American History (June 2006): 63-90.

“The Culture of the Informal Economy:  Numbers Runners in Inter-War Black Detroit,” The Radical History Review (Fall 1997): 46-75.

“‘Bible, Bath, and Broom’:  Nannie Helen Burroughs, the National Training School, and the Uplift of the Race,” Journal of Women’s History (Spring 1997): 88-110.

• National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship, Spring 2016
• Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2014-present
• Susan B. Anthony Institute Research Grant, University of Rochester, Spring 2010
• Abraham J. Karp Award for Excellence in Teaching, University of Rochester, Spring 2005
• Beveridge Grant, American Historical Association, 2002
• Lerner-Scott Dissertation Prize of the Organization of American Historians, 1997