About Me

I'm a historian, researcher, writer, and graduate student at the University of Delaware, where I'm pursuing an MA in History and a graduate certificate in Museum and Public History. My research focuses on the legal and economic history of colonial America, particularly women's experiences of the law and the ways they navigated property, marriage, inheritance, and widowhood.

I'm especially interested in the distance between what the law prescribed and how people actually lived. Much of my research involves following women through court records, wills, correspondence, and other surviving documents, trying to understand the decisions they made within the circumstances of their own lives. I believe the people of the past deserve to be understood on their own terms, even when their choices don't fit neatly into our expectations.

Before coming to Delaware, I earned my BA in History, summa cum laude, from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. There, I worked in Archives and Special Collections, including restoring and enhancing more than ninety NASA/Apollo oral history recordings. I also developed Called to Care, a digital exhibit examining faith-based responses to the AIDS epidemic in Alabama during the 1980s and 1990s. As editor-in-chief of Perpetua, UAH's undergraduate research journal, I helped revive the publication and establish a new editorial model. My undergraduate research also led to conference presentations and an article on widows' economic self-determination in the colonial Chesapeake.

Of course, academia wasn't where my professional life began.

Long before I started spending my time with eighteenth-century legal records, I was writing novels and running an independent publishing company. I founded Silver Empire Publishing in 2014 and spent eight years working with authors, editing and publishing more than thirty books, and managing everything from production to marketing. Along the way, I published four novels of my own, worked with award-winning and Hugo-nominated writers, and ran successful crowdfunding campaigns. That experience taught me a great deal about making complicated projects happen, working with creative people, and communicating with an audience.

I haven't left writing behind. I still develop fiction projects, including Knights of Washington, a historical fantasy series set during the American Revolution. I also write New World Sagas, my Substack, where I explore historical subjects that catch my attention and occasionally follow a research question considerably further than I intended.

I suppose the common thread is curiosity. I've spent much of my professional life trying to understand people and communicate their stories, whether through historical research, a museum exhibit, or a novel. These days, I have the added pleasure of discovering just how much more complicated the past is than I ever imagined.