About Me
I am a historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, specializing in the intersection of religion and nationalism. I am a member of the faculty of The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology (GSMST), the top-ranked public high school in Georgia and U.S. News & World Report's seventh-best high school in the United States. My first book, Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, was published with Cornell University Press in August 2023. It was awarded the inaugural Christopher J. Kauffman Prize in U.S. Catholic History in 2026 from the American Catholic Historical Association. My second book, Soldiers and Sacraments: The Lived Catholic Civil War, is under contract with LSU Press.
I graduated in 2016 with a PhD in History from The Pennsylvania State University, where I was a member of the Department of History and the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, and I completed my dissertation under the direction of Dr. Amy S. Greenberg and Dr. Philip Jenkins. My research interests are in the Civil War Era, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, lived religion, anti-Catholicism and the Catholic response, Catholic-Protestant interactions, nationalism, history and memory, imperialism, immigration and ethnicity, religion in the public sphere, religion and gender, and religion and the environment.