• PhD, Michigan, 1995

HIS 161: United States History I (to 1865)
HIS 215: Death in America
HIS 452: Topics 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, Native Americans, African-Americans, death

Smallpox 1721: A People’s History of Colonial Boston’s Deadliest Epidemic (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2027)

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, Prosperity, and Boston’s Death Economy in the 1721 Smallpox Epidemic,” New England Quarterly 98 (March 2025): 4-41

“Religion in Boston’s 1721 Smallpox Epidemic: Disease and Devotion in Social Context,” Religion and American Culture 34 (Winter 2024): 1-33

“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

“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