I am a Ph.D. candidate who studies slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world with a focus on France and its empire. In Spring 2021, I completed my General Examinations in "European History, 1650-1914," "Modern Intellectual History," "Race, Slavery, and Abolition," and "Legacies of the Haitian Revolution." I am broadly interested in histories of political economy, capitalism, national sovereignty, abolition, reparations, and imperialism.
My dissertation addresses the specific case of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, where I explore Haiti's sovereign debt in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution and argue for the international significance of the debt for finance, monetary systems, nation-making, and political thought in the first half of the nineteenth century. My research is supported by the Social Science Research Council's Mellon International Dissertation Research Fellowship, a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French Embassy, a Lapidus Center Fellowship at the Schomburg Center, an Interamericas Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library, a Gustave Gimon Fellowship at Stanford University Libraries, a short-term fellowship at the Huntington Library, and the Economic History Association, among other sources.
At Penn, I have co-organized multiple workshops, including our department's Graduate Colloquium, lectures and reading groups. From 2019-20 I served as the Clio co-president, the department's graduate student organization.
My writing about art and history has been published in Slavery & Abolition and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Prospective students, please contact me if you have questions about studying at Penn!
Advisor: Sophia Rosenfeld
Committee Members: Warren Breckman, Kathleen Brown, Roquinaldo Ferreira, Marc Flandreau
B.A., History (honors) and Philosophy, Columbia University, 2018
M.A., History, UPenn, 2020
slavery and abolition; race; the Atlantic World, particularly the Caribbean; 18th and 19th century France and its empire; political economy; financial history; modern intellectual history
HIST 344: European Intellectual History, 1870-1950
HIST 133: The History of Free Speech & Censorship
HIST 001: Making the Modern World
HIST 153 / URB 104: Transformations of Urban America, 1945-Present
"Slavery on Display," Slavery & Abolition (2023)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0144039X.2022.2144050
"Biddy Mason in Images: A Monumental Life in Monumental Forms," LARB (2021)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/biddy-mason-in-images-a-monumental-life-in-monumental-forms/