I am a historian of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States, specializing in politics and law. My research explores how people in the United States and its peripheries imagined, understood, and worked out the contours of federalism and sovereignty, justice and the rule of law, constitutional meaning, and the evolution of rights and citizenship in the context of their everyday lives. In particular, I focus on understanding what governance was and how it functioned at a local level in the early United States.

My current project, Negotiating Peace and Power: Amnesty in the Early United States, examines the role of amnesty in establishing peace after violent conflict in the early United States. It demonstrates how the weakness of the federal judiciary resulted in government officials and the public using amnesty as a tool of negotiation to resolve violent political conflicts about the Constitution and shape the development of the federal state on a local level.