• PhD, Michigan, 1995

HIS 161: U.S. History to 1865
HIS 215: Death in America
HIS 452: Indians: Africans: and Europeans in Colonial America
HIS 533: Readings in Early American History
HIS 534: The Atlantic World: 1400-1800
HIS 580: Radical Religion in the Anglo-Atlantic World

Colonial North America: religion, Indians, African-Americans, death

Boston's Pox of 1721: A People's History (book in progress)

Books

Speaking with the Dead in Early America  (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019)

• Winner of the 2020 Lawrence W. Levine Award from the Organization of American Historians, for the best book in American cultural history

The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, second edition, co-edited with Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Routledge, 2018)

The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Colonial North America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011)

Death in the New World: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 1492-1800 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)

Pious Persuasions: Laity and Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New England (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999)

Selected Articles and Chapters

“Precarity and Prosperity in Boston’s 1721 Smallpox Epidemic,” New England Quarterly (forthcoming 2025).

“Corpses and the Protestant Cult of the Dead,” Body and Religion 4 (May 2022): 151-72.

"The Presence of the Dead among U.S. Protestants, 1800-1848," Church History 88 (June 2019): 381-408.

“Native Spirits, Shaker Visions: Speaking with the Dead in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 35 (Fall 2015): 347-73.

“Death in the Atlantic World,” in Oxford Bibliographies in Atlantic History, edited by Trevor Burnard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) (9000-word online publication).

“Piety and Practice in North America to 1800,” Cambridge History of Religions in America, edited by Stephen J. Stein, 3 vols. (New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2012): 1:686-707.

“Reassessing the ‘Sankofa Symbol’ in New York’s African Burial Ground,” William and Mary Quarterly, vol 67 (January 2010): 101-22.

• Recipient of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History for the Years 2010-2012, New York Academy of History

“Jews in the Early Modern Atlantic:   Crossing Boundaries, Keeping Faith,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, edited by Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Prentice-Hall, 2007), 39-59.

“Reading Indians’ Deathbed Scenes:   Ethnohistorical and Representational Approaches,” Journal of American History , vol. 88 (June 2001): 17-47.

“‘Justise Must Take Plase’:   Three African Americans Speak of Religion in Eighteenth-Century New England,” William and Mary Quarterly , vol. 56 (April 1999): 395-416.

• Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellowship, University of Erfurt, Germany, April to July 2023
  
• Lawrence W. Levine Award for best book in American cultural history, Organization of American Historians, April 2020
• Herbert H. Lehman Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in New York History, New York Academy of History, 2010 to 2012
• Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellowship, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, January to May 2005
• National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers, August 2001 to July 2002