I have taught U.S. cultural history and American Studies at the University of Michigan since 2001. Before that, I spent three years as an Assistant Professor at Butler University in Indianapolis. Between 2017 and 2021, I had the honor of Chairing the Department of History at UM. Since July 2023, I have served as the inaugural Director of Research for the Inclusive History Project at UM Ann Arbor (a university-wide public engagement project through the UM President’s Office and National Center for Institutional Diversity).
Growing up, my family bounced around a lot: first between California, New York, and Boston, and then to a rust belt town roughly an hour west of Ann Arbor. This last move taught me quite a bit about the decline of the U.S. auto industry, the complexities of race and class, and above all, about the human costs of global capitalism. Following high school, I moved east to Princeton, which proved to be an awkward social fit (especially during the Reagan years). Still, I was fortunate in my teachers, who introduced me to the “new cultural history” at an early moment in the field’s development. As an undergraduate, I wandered into a series of remarkable courses taught by Robert Darnton, Natalie Zemon Davis, Philip Nord, Anthony Grafton, Michael Jennings, and Daniel Rodgers: courses which suggested entirely new ways of thinking about the philosophy and practice of history. Following a year in Berlin on a Fulbright Fellowship, I worked in the bowels of an ad agency and decided to become an Americanist, in large part, because I wanted to pursue topics more closely related to my 22-year-old passions (from punk rock and college radio to African American modernism). These passions led me to Berkeley for my Ph.D., and there, too, I was very fortunate in my teachers. From my dissertation advisor, Lawrence Levine, I learned to think seriously about historical empathy, the long arcs of the U.S. culture wars, and this elusive thing we call “the popular.” With Waldo Martin and Leon Litwack, I developed a deeper understanding of the African American freedom struggle and taught my first classes in the field. From Margaretta Lovell and Wanda Corn, I learned to think seriously about images and objects. And from Martin Jay, I absorbed a whole host of new conceptual ideas, from the varieties of Neo-Marxism to the history of vision and visuality.
In many respects, my work over the past ~25 years is a product of this eclectic background. Roughly speaking, it has fallen into six principal areas:
- the history of the global culture industries
- the interrelation of culture and capitalism
- African American art, ideas, and politics
- the history of visuality
- the history of celebrity
- the history of cultural history (i.e., the evolution of the field)
My publications include The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (2001); The Colossal P.T. Barnum Reader (2005); and The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present & Future (2008). I have also published articles in the American Historical Review, the Journal of American History, American Quarterly, Common-Place, and Raritan (links to some of these articles are available for download through this website). At present, I am finishing a large book on the first waves of African-American artists, writers, and activists to strategize their careers in global markets (roughly from Phillis Wheatley to Paul Robeson). I am also finishing a major essay collection on the futures of cultural history.
At Michigan, I have won prizes for my teaching, including a University Distinguished Undergraduate Teaching Award (in 2004) and a LSA Excellence in Education Award (in 2005). My course offerings include:
- The History of U.S. Mass Culture from Minstrelsy through Hip Hop (History 369)
- The History of Global Celebrity form the 17th Century to the Present
- New York Modern: The Cultures of the Great Metropolis (History 365)
- Black Cultural Traffic: A Global History (History 328)
- The Civil War Era in U.S. History (History 280)
- The Politics of Slavery & Anti-Slavery (History 197)
- Graduate Seminar in U.S. Cultural History (History 686)
- The Literatures of U.S. History (History 611)
- Inclusive History Lab: Land, Culture, Memory, Repair (History 717)
In addition, I’ve had the privilege of facilitating wonderfully vibrant dissertation groups in U.S. cultural & intellectual history, as well as a Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop entitled “The New Materialisms Working Group.” For additional information about studying U.S. cultural and intellectual history at Michigan, please contact me directly: [email protected]
