I am presently the Curator of the Harvard Theatre Collection, which is a department of Houghton Library at Harvard University. Prior to this I was a curator at the American Numismatic Society in New York City, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and a Curatorial Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center. At the latter I served as the curator for the award-winning exhibition Circus and the City: New York, 1793-2010, and also edited a volume, The American Circus, for Yale University Press. I received my Ph.D. from the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. My scholarly work has focused on the cultural, material, and transnational history of the nineteenth-century United States and on the dynamics of popular entertainment in particular. I recently wrote the opening chapter for the Cambridge Companion to the Circus. One of my current projects looks at the experiences of American entertainers who traveled around the Pacific in the wake of the California Gold Rush. Another is an exhibition, American Drag, which will be on view at Houghton Library from September 6, 2022-January 6, 2023.

Contact