Research & Publications
As an American Studies scholar, my research employs interdisciplinary methods and sources to recapture silent voices that expose the wide range of experiences in the American past. Specifically, I use the methodologies of vernacular architecture, cultural landscape studies, material culture, and environmental history to read buildings, landscapes, objects, and “nature” as texts embedded with cultural evidence. This approach to scholarship fosters inclusivity by telling the stories of those who did not write them down or whose were intentionally excised. My research has primarily concentrated on the late-nineteenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles, Book Chapter, & Encyclopedia Entries
“Restoration’s Dark Side: Gentrification and Daylighting the Saw Mill River in Yonkers, New York,” in Greg Gordon, ed., Rewilding America’s Urban Rivers: Conservation in the Anthropocene (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024)
“Introducing Environmental History into Vernacular Architecture: Considerations from New England’s Historic Dams,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 24, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 1-21
“Vacationing with the Civil War: Maine’s Regimental Summer Cottages,” Civil War History 63, no. 2 (June 2017): 151-180
“Proving Preservation: Boston Subway Construction Photography, 1894-1897,” Future Anterior 10, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 16-31
27 entries on buildings and landscapes in Massachusetts and (with Aaron Ahlstrom) “Overview of Massachusetts”
Book Manuscript
The Summer Homes of the Survivors: Buildings and Landscapes of the Civil War Vacation, 1878-1918
(under contract with University of Virginia Press)
My book argues that some Civil War veterans constructed seasonal cottages and campgrounds to solidify their own memory, promote healing, and convey their self-defined legacy to descendants in ways no other cultural outlets could achieve. A genuinely unique project, this book identifies a genre of the built environment in New England, the Midwest, and the South that neither architectural historians nor historians have seriously investigated. These buildings and landscapes are evocative of a broader history of Civil War veterans understanding their role in the nation’s bloodiest conflict as well as their place in postwar America. This interdisciplinary book investigates specific places—buildings, landscapes, and the objects they contained—to explain why and how veterans invented a new genre of space to combine leisure and memory that reveals issues of race, gender, class, and memory among the veterans, their kin, and the public.
Manuscripts in Preparation
Destination “Magic Town”: Capitalism, Corporate Branding, and the Trackside Architecture of the Portland & Rumford Falls Railway, 1890-1897 [article]
“This is Not a Wilderness Area”: Cape Cod National Seashore, the National Park Service, and Hybridity [article]
Military History and Memory: A Case Study of the Fifth Maine Regiment’s Captured Confederate Flags (with Curtis Mildner) [article]
Podcasts/Radio/Television Interviews
Mainely History (August 17, 2021)
Assignment: Maine, Maine Public Television (December 17, 2024)
Under the Radar with Callie Crossley, WGBH (October 7, 2022)
“Upta Camp”
Maine Calling (hosted by Jennifer Rooks), MPBN (May 28, 2024)
Other Publications
“The past, present and future of the NPS,” Boston University Public Relations “Expert Commentary,” August 2016
Guest Commentary, “Dwelling in Landscape” by Daniel Bluestone, Friends of Fairsted Lecture Series, December 2014
2023 Vernacular Architecture Forum Conference Guidebook, May 2023 (editor/designer)
Book Reviews
War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era edited by Joan E. Cashin (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Material Culture: Journal of the Pioneer America Society 53, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 68-70
Heading Out: A History of American Camping by Terence Young (Cornell University Press, 2017), Material Culture: Journal of the Pioneer America Society 50, no. 2 (Fall 2018): 75-77