current and recent projects
Lately, I have caught the food studies bug. I teach two courses in food studies: “Food, Culture, and Society” and “Labor and the Global Food System.” In these courses, I am excited to bring an anti-racist and feminist perspective to issues of food, the environment, and climate change.
The impact of COVID-19 on our global food system has been a central part of our inquiry, from essential laborers to the mutual aid and grassroots efforts to address food, economic, and health crises.
Topics for recent or in-progress articles include: globally circulating commodities and foreign relations; gender and the history of capitalism (co-authored); how and why the “new history of capitalism” keeps missing the boat with gender and race; a consideration of the relationship between “farmer” and “campesino” as political categories; higher education and revenue-generating projects; indigenous food sovereignty; and activists for clean water and air.
Current & Forthcoming Work
"The Mismanaged Campus, or What's That Smell?" AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom, expected 2020.
“Corporate Imperialism and the World of Goods,” Cambridge History of America in the World, volume 3, 1900-1945 Brooke Blower and Andrew Preston, eds., Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2021.
Co-authored with Tracey Deutsch, “Capitalism in the 20th Century” in A Companion to American Women’s History, 2nd Edition, Nancy Hewitt and Anne Valk, eds., London: Blackwell, forthcoming 2021
Recently Published
Exhibit Review: “The Lands We Share”
Journal of American History, June 2020
Boston Review, March 21, 2019
Business schools fetishize entrepreneurial innovation, but their most prominent heroes succeeded because they manipulated corporate law, not because of personal brilliance.
The “Sonorous Summons”of the New History of Capitalism
Modern American History, January 31, 2019
The tale reads as a classic fall from grace. In the 1960s and 1970s, historians investigated the economy. They were serious and politically relevant. But then the discipline fell to the beguiling ways of cultural and social history...
Smoking Hot
Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique 2016
“Smoking Hot: Cigarettes, Jazz and the Production of Global Imaginaries in Interwar Shanghai,” in Ron Radano and Tejumola Olaniyan eds., Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique. Duke University Press, 2016
To Know Tobacco
Southern Cultures, Winter 2007
Go to one of the tobacco areas in North Carolina or Virginia today and you will still find a large number of people who, as the saying goes, "know tobacco." That is, you will encounter people who grew up in close proximity to multiple stages of tobacco production: a great many tended it on the farm when young, learned to cure it, and then brought it for sale in the tobacco markets.
Toxicity and the Consuming Subject
States of Emergency: Towards a Future History of American Studies, 2009
“Toxicity and the Consuming Subject,” in Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman, eds., States of Emergency: Towards a Future History of American Studies (University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 55-68.
Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure
Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Columbia University Press, 1999.