Research

Research Interests

My research focuses on the legal and economic history of early America, particularly the experiences of women. I'm interested in how law shaped people's lives, but also in the ways people understood, negotiated, and sometimes worked around the legal structures governing their relationships and property.

Much of my work begins with the tension between legal doctrine and lived experience. Court proceedings, wills, deeds, and other surviving records offer glimpses of people making decisions about their families, livelihoods, and futures. I want to understand not only what the law allowed, but how it actually functioned in the lives of the people subject to it.

Current Research

Unvested Capital | MA Thesis, University of Delaware

My master's thesis examines the legal and economic significance of dower in colonial Maryland, particularly the property interests women held during marriage and the implications of those interests for the colony's economy.

Dower is often discussed primarily in terms of widowhood, but women's legal interests in property existed before their husbands died. I'm interested in what those interests meant in practice, particularly in a society where land, credit, and family relationships were closely intertwined. The project considers how the law recognized women's interests in property and how those interests figured into the economic relationships of colonial Maryland.

Other Projects

Fathers, Daughters, and Education in the Early Republic
Article in progress
This article looks at elite fathers and their daughters’ education in the decades after the Revolution, roughly 1780 to 1810. It follows several prominent families, including those of Henry Knox, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Rush, and Henry Laurens. The sources are correspondence, memoirs, and educational texts, partly from research in the Gilder Lehrman Collection.

Women Tavern Keepers and Credit in Colonial Virginia
Research in progress
This project studies women who kept taverns and ordinaries in eighteenth-century Virginia, centered on Williamsburg and York County. Using account books, probate inventories, and county court records, it reconstructs how these women ran their businesses and how they extended, recorded, and collected credit.

Widows’ Paraphernalia
Material culture study in development
English common law let a widow keep certain personal goods (her clothing, jewelry, and ornaments) separate from her dower. This study looks at those goods, especially jewelry, and at what widows did with them, including what they chose to bequeath. It draws on probate records and the collections at Winterthur.