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Education

Ph.D., University of Chicago (2014)

Research and Teaching Interests

My research focuses on the violent side of American politics and state formation, though I am also interested in political geography and institutional emergence and evolution more generally.  My current book project, entitled Arming the Body Politic: The Economic Origins of American Gun Rights, explores how the US firearms industry has articulated and promoted the private right to purchase and possess guns since the nineteenth century.  

A commitment to looking at often neglected forms of political practice and placing them into a specific historical context influences the courses I teach, which not only focus on how political institutions in the US work, but also on how they develop.  In my introductory courses on American politics, for example, we pay special attention to how power and protest help determine which issues are important to Americans in specific times, as well as examine the ways in which American political institutions have both shaped and been shaped by a wide variety of domestic and foreign conflicts.  I also teach several courses which engage theoretical perspectives on the historical and institutional analysis of power, coercion and the state in U.S. politics, in addition to a First Year Seminar on the meaning and uses of violence in political life.

Selected Publications

Books

The Six-Shooter State: Public and Private Violence in American Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2018

Articles and Chapters

"Policing the Boundary and Bounding the Police: The Making of Gendarmeries in North America," Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2021), pp. 301-318

"Shocked into Service: How Free Trade Increases the U.S. Military's Geographical Gap," (with Adam Dean), International Interactions, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2020), pp. 51-81

"Keeping Vigil: The Emergence of Vigilance Committees in Pre-Civil War America," (with Eleonora Mattiacci), Perspectives on Politics, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2018), pp. 600-616

“The Co-Evolution of Public and Private Security in Nineteenth Century Chicago,” Law & Social Inquiry, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2018), pp. 827-861

“A Fragmented Force: The Evolution of Federal Law Enforcement in the U.S., 1870-1900,” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 29, No. 4 (2017), pp. 640-675

“The Six-Shooter Marketplace: 19^th Century Gunfighting as Violence Expertise,” Studies in American Political Development, Vol. 28, No. 1 (April 2014), pp. 49-79

“Conflict Displacement and Dual Inclusion in the Construction of Germany” (with John F. Padgett), in The Emergence of Organizations and Markets, John F. Padgett and Walter Powell eds. (Princeton University Press, 2013)