Georgia State University

Faculty Member, History

Assistant Professor

About

I am a historian of law, media, and the American landscape. My work examines how the ideological transition to an “information society” reshaped American political culture and economic policy, as well as the built environment. I received my BA (2003) from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and PhD (2009) from Columbia University, studying with Elizabeth Blackmar and Barbara Fields. I am currently revising my first book, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright, for publication by Oxford University Press. 

My next project looks at North Carolina's Research Triangle region as a landscape of the post-industrial economy of the late twentieth century.  It approaches the same economic and technological shift that my first book examined through law by looking instead at local boosterism, the role of the federal government in fostering high-technology "hubs" such as the Triangle, and the changing racial and class demographics of the prosperous, sprawling metropolitan area encompassing Chapel Hill, Raleigh, and Durham.

I have been fortunate to receive awards such as the American Baptist Historical Society's Torbet Prize, and my research has been supported by the generosity of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University, Vassar College, the Consortium for Faculty Diversity, and the American Council of Learned Societies.