THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
RESEARCH INTERESTS
19th century US, intellectual history, labor history, history of capitalism, political economy, slavery and abolition, philosophy of history
BIOGRAPHY
I am a joint PhD student in the Department of History and the Committee on Social Thought. Before coming to Chicago, I worked for a few years as an assistant editor at Jacobin magazine, for which I still occasionally write. In 2022, I received an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Trinity College, Cambridge, supported by a Dunlevie King's Hall Studentship. My MPhil thesis offered a close reading of Henry Thoreau and Karl Marx that investigated similarities in their analyses of labor, history, and value. I graduated from Princeton University in 2021 with a BA in history, with a thesis that studied antebellum slaveholders' conceptions of "labor" in theoretical writings and in plantation management.
I also currently serve as a contributing editor at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog, where I publish interviews with academics from time to time. Feel free to pitch me an article, too!
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- “Human Labor and Natural Labor in Henry David Thoreau’s Works.” Modern Intellectual History, 2024, 1–23.
- “A Natural Critic of Political Economy: Thoreau, Marx, and the Temporal Problem of Labor.” In Radical Transcendentalisms, ed. Alex Moskowitz and Ted Stolze (Leiden: Brill Historical Materialism Series, forthcoming in 2025).
- “Slavery, Capitalism, and the Politics of Abolition.” Review of Robin Blackburn, The Reckoning: From the Second Slavery to Abolition, 1776–1888 (Verso, 2024). Jacobin, May 19, 2024.