Education

Ph.D. Princeton University, 2013
M.A. Princeton University, 2009
B.A. Harvard, 2007

Biography

I am a historian of the twentieth century United States. My work focuses on how organized interest groups and everyday Americans influence government policy and the terms of political debate. My current research focuses on the rise of whistleblowing as a form of regulation, a labor right, a mechanism for bureaucratic accountability, a way to save money, and a very contested expression of idealized citizenship.

Along with Katherine Turk, I am currently working on SILKWOOD, a political biography of nuclear whistleblower Karen Silkwood. We focus on the civil case brought by her estate, Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee. The case began Oklahoma City but ultimately ended up before the Supreme Court, changing Hollywood, legal culture, and nuclear regulation along the way. SILKWOOD shows how the social forces of the 1970s—feminism, environmentalism, civil libertarianism, independent media, organized labor—produced a versatile political symbol and trial of the century.

My first book, The Cigarette: A Political History is a history of tobacco in the twentieth century that places farmers, government officials, and citizen-activists at the center of the story. Rather than focusing exclusively on "Big Tobacco," I argue that  domestic and global cigarette consumption rose through the efforts of organized tobacco farmers and US government officials; and that it fell as a result of local government action spurred by the efforts of citizen-activists and activist lawyers. The Cigarette won the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Society for Southern Women Historians for the best book in Southern History and the PROSE Award for North American History from the Association of American Publishers. It was a finalist for the LA Times Book prize and one of Smithsonian Magazine's "Best History Titles of 2019." 

Publications

Book

The Cigarette: A Political History (Harvard, 2019). 

Articles

"Gags and Grievance: The Labor Origins of Whistleblowing," Knight First Amendment Institute (2024). 

"Smoke Ring: From American Tobacco to Japanese Data," Osiris  33 (2018): 319-339. 

"Promoting Agriculture: Farmers, the State, and Checkoff Marketing, 1935-2005," Business History Review, 90, No. 3 (2016): 505-536.  

"Smoking as Statecraft: Promoting American Tobacco Production and Global Cigarette Consumption, 1947–1970," Journal of Policy History 28, No. 4. (2016).

Book Chapters 

with Reuel Schiller, "Creating Initiatory Democracy": Ralph Nader, the Center for Responsive Law, and the Shaping of Liberalism in the 1970s in Mastery and Drift: Professional Class Liberals Since the 1960s (University of Chicago Press, 2025). 

"Clearing the Air and Counting Costs: Shimp v. New Jersey Bell and the Tragedy of Workplace Smoking" in Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century Ed. Brent Cebul, Lily Geismer, Mason Williams (University of Chicago Press, 2018). 

Internet and Popular Press Publications

with Katherine Turk, "Whistleblower Karen Silkwood's Urgent Message for Us," Jacobin, 28 December 2024. 

"The End of the Illusion that Smoking is a Choice," New York Times, 6 July 2022. 

"Marijuana Reform Should Focus on Inequality," The Atlantic, 5 October 2019. 

"How the Vaping Industry is Using a Defensive Technique Pioneered Decades Ago By Big Tobacco," Time, 2 October 2019. 

"Like the Tobacco Industry, E-Cigarette Manufacturers are Targeting Children," Washington Post, 18 September 2018. 

  "Grass Roots Activists Won the War on Smoking. Can They Win the War on Climate Change?" Washington Post, 29 June 2017. 

(with Sarah Seo)  "Governor Shouldn't Sign Smoking Fine Bill," Richmond Times-Dispatch, 22 March 2016. 

(with Gabriel Rosenberg) "Back to school--or back to the fields?" The Hill, 11 August 2015. 

  "Time to Regulate E-Cigarettes is Now," Christian Science Monitor, 9 January 2014. 

Awards and Honors

Princeton University Center for Human Values Residential Fellow (2022-2023)

Mead Endowment Faculty Award (2018-2019) 

Fellow, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (2017)

Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, University of California-San Francisco (Fall 2013)

Woodrow Wilson Society of Fellows, Princeton University (2011-2012)

Courses Taught

FORU 1500: American Dreams 

HIST 4890: Distinguished Majors Program Seminar 

HIUS 1501: Disasters in America from Cholera to Katrina

HIUS 1501: The United States through Tobacco

HIUS 3151: Moralizing, Modernizing and Mass Politics, US 1900-1945

HIUS 3161: Viewing America 

HIUS 3171: United States Since 1945

HIUS 3559: United States in the 1970s

HIUS 4500/STS3500: Debating Science in Modern America

HIUS 4501: Eugenics 

HIUS 7151: Readings in US History Since 1945 

HIUS 9021: United States in Transnational Perspective (Graduate Tutorial)

HIUS 9022: History of US Capitalism (Graduate Tutorial)