Welcome and hello! I wear many hats — as a scholar, writer, teacher, and coach — so this website offers some information about each one of those areas of my professional life.

In September 2020, I began teaching History at Phillips Academy (Andover), an independent secondary school located in Andover, Massachusetts. Previously I worked in various capacities with students of many ages, from elementary schoolers to college seniors. I primarily teach U.S. History (with 11th and 12th graders), World History (with 9th graders), and a senior elective on African Environmental History. At Andover, I am also the director of the Track & Field program, which boasts a roster of over 140 athletes, as well as the head coach of the Girls Cross Country team.

I’m formally trained as a social and environmental historian of Africa. When I’m not teaching, I am working on a book manuscript entitled Elastic Allegiances: Producing Rubber and Belonging in Ghana, 1880-2017, which reconstructs the history of Ghana’s rubber industry from the early colonial period to the neoliberal era. Some of my related research has already been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, including the Journal of African History and the Journal of West African History.

In both my teaching and research, I’m very interested in multidisciplinary scholarship. While completing my doctorate in History at Yale University, I worked to promote connections across departments, first by working in different capacities for the McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life and later as the Program Coordinator for the interdisciplinary Program in Agrarian Studies of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. For a year after completing my graduate studies, I worked as a Case Writer for the Tobin Project, a non-profit organization devoted to catalyzing social science research aimed at addressing pressing problems facing the world. In my role, I worked with scholars to develop new teaching materials for high school and college history courses designed to help students develop analytic problem-solving and decision-making skills.

Before pursuing my PhD, I received my BA from Amherst College and then traveled and researched abroad for a year while completing a Watson Fellowship. At Amherst, I was a member and captain of the Women’s Cross Country and Track & Field teams, and I earned All-American honors seven times. I returned to the sport while at Yale, where I volunteered as an assistant coach for the varsity Women’s Cross Country and Track & Field teams for two years. These days I no longer run competitively, but I still enjoy trail running, easy runs with the PATF and PAGXC teams, and of course taking long walks with spouse, Matt, and our dog, Mackenzie.