I am a historian of early America and the Atlantic World.

Raised in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, I graduated from Brigham Young University with a BA and MA, both in history, before attending the College of William & Mary, where I completed a PhD in early American history in 2016. After spending a year at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, I returned to BYU, first as an adjunct instructor, then visiting assistant professor, and, since 2019, assistant professor of history.

Since January 2023, I have served as editor of the Journal of Mormon History, the flagship journal of the Mormon History Association. I also co-direct (with Eric Herschthal) the Rocky Mountain Seminar in Early American History. 

At BYU, I teach a variety of courses, including U.S. History to 1877, Introduction to Family History, Family and Law in American History, Colonial North American Family History, Revolutionary America, Religion in American History, Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa and the Atlantic World, African American Family History, English Language Paleography, and Missions and Missionaries in American History.

My research focuses on religion, race, and slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My book manuscript, Connections: The Making of American Methodism in the Revolutionary Atlantic World, examines the beginnings of Methodism in North America and the Caribbean. It traces the expansive growth of the movement during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and explores the divisions that accompanied that growth, as Methodists split over geopolitics, race, and slavery. It argues that these divisions were crucial to the emergence of a distinctly American Methodism in the nineteenth century. Based on extensive research in more than two-dozen archives throughout the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean, the book provides fresh insight into the complicated intersections of religious, racial, and political identities in the Revolutionary Atlantic World.

With David Golding, I co-edited Missionary Interests: Protestant and Mormon Missions in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Cornell University Press, 2024), which has been praised as “provocative and well-conceived,” “filled with smart, insightful, and compelling chapters on Protestant and Mormon missions across time and space,” and “an exciting contribution to studies on Mormonism and Protestantism” that “offer[s] a nuanced exploration of faith, culture, and human interaction.”

Outside of the classroom and archives, I enjoy traveling, cooking (and eating!) good food, and exploring Utah’s majestic outdoors with my family.