Education

Ph.D., Princeton University, 2015
M.A., Princeton University, 2010
M.A., Florida International University, 2008
B.A., Swarthmore College, 2004

Biography

My research explores the intersection of African American history, American economic history, and the history of American slavery.  Specifically, I look at slavery’s influence on the evolution of African American economic life.  My newest book, Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank, chronicles the rise and fall of the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company.  Savings and Trust exposes how the failure of the Freedman’s Bank has shaped economic inequality in America.  Savings and Trust was reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and it received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly.  Moreover, Publisher’s Weekly named Savings and Trust one of the best nonfiction books of 2024. 

My first book, Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (April 2021 on Columbia University Press, in the Columbia Series in the History of U.S. Capitalism), explores the economic lives of enslaved people, not as property or bonded laborers, but as active participants in their local economies.  Unfree Markets provides the fullest account to date of the strategies that enslaved people used to create their own networks of commerce, from the colonial period to the Civil War.  It confronts one of the most enduring questions in African American history and the history of American capitalism: How beneficial was capitalism to African Americans?  Through examining an array of archival records, from slaveholder account books to legislative petitions, Unfree Markets shows that even though enslaved people shaped the increasingly capitalist economy of slavery, economic participation alone could not secure what bondspeople wanted most—their freedom.  The time and energy that enslaved people invested in their own economic enterprises did not bring them out of slavery; instead, it kept them enslaved.  Ultimately, Unfree Markets demonstrates that the vestiges of race-based economic inequality are not in the late-nineteenth or twentieth centuries, but in the period of legal slavery.

I have been awarded a Carnegie Fellowship and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship.  I was the co-winner of the 2025 Harold F. Williamson Prize from the Business History Conference, for a mid-career scholar who has made significant contributions to the field of business history.  I was also awarded an inaugural Dean's Research Fellowship from the Dean of the College & Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at UVA.  

I am a Trustee of the Midland School and I serve on the Board of The Shockoe Institute.  I am also on the editorial boards of Enterprise & Society: The International Journal of Business History, The Journal of the Civil War Era, UVA Press.

Publications

• Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman's Bank (October 2024, W.W. Norton). 
• Inequality in America: A Concise History (under contract with W.W. Norton).
• "'This Slavery Business is a Horrible Thing': The Economy of American Slavery in the Lives of the Enslaved," Business History Review, Summer 2023. 
• Unfree Markets: The Slaves' Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (April 2021, Columbia University Press).
• "Felonious Transactions: Legal Culture and Business Practices of Slave Economies in South Carolina, 1787–1860." Enterprise & Society 18, no. 4 (2017): 772-783.

Media Appearances

• “The Freedman's Bank & Economic Disparities Today,” Fresh Air, NPR.
• "How the Freedman’s Bank Failure Still Effects Black Americans,” Marketplace, NPR.
• "Lincoln's Dilemma," Apple TV+. 
• Virginia Public Media, "Racism: Challenging Perceptions, Access to Wealth," October 2020. 

Internet and Popular Press Publications

• "The Freedman's Bank Forum obscures the bank's real history," The Washington Post, October, 27, 2022. 
• "The Language of Blackness and Racial Identity in American History," The American Historian, Spring 2022. 

Selected Awards and Honors

Shortlist, Mark Lynton History Prize, Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation.

Co-Winner, Harold F. Williamson Prize, Business History Conference. 

Finalist, 2025 Hagley Prize, Business History Conference. 

2025 Porchlight Business Book Award, Narrative & Biography.

Dean’s Research Fellowship, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Virginia, 2024-27. 

Mellon New Direction Fellowship, Mellon Foundation, 2023-26. 

2022 Carnegie Fellow, Carnegie Corporation of New York. 

Courses Taught

HIUS 1501: American Slavery and the Law

HIUS 1501: Inequality in America

HIUS 3651: African American History to 1865

HIUS 2059: American Slavery

HIUS 4501: Capitalism and Slavery