About

I am the Associate Director of the Preservation Studies Master’s Program at Boston University. I am an interdisciplinary historian of 19th and 20th century American vernacular architecture and cultural landscapes. My work critically reads the past through a variety of sources—material, written, visual—to understand the ways people molded their built and “natural” environments according to their value systems. I am currently preparing a book manuscript (under contract with the University of Virginia Press), The Summer Homes of the Survivors: Buildings and Landscapes of the Civil War Vacation, 1878-1918, which explores group vacation cottages and campgrounds constructed by Civil War veterans as places to merge memory and leisure among their comrades and families. My research has been supported by fellowships from the Vernacular Architecture Forum, New England Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I hold a PhD in American & New England Studies and an MA in Preservation Studies, both from Boston University.