RESEARCH

I am interested in how medicolegal systems construct insane persons, habitual drunkards, and addicts as pathologized kinds of personhood and govern them across clinical, legal, and carceral spaces.

My first book, Habitual Drunkard: King Alcohol, Fallen Men, and the Dilemmas of Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century United States, is under contract with Rutgers University Press’s Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series. I argue that the nineteenth-century American quest to define, detect, and discipline compulsive drinkers transformed the civil law courtroom into an arena for contesting the thresholds of mental capacity, legal personhood, and full citizenship. From guardianship, also known as conservatorship, to divorce and life insurance litigation, these gripping yet largely forgotten contests positioned inchoate medical framings of compulsion as a key characteristic demarcating the habitual drunkard from the moderate drinker. The reciprocal relationship between medicine and the law that defined the “habitual drunkard” in court anticipates the “addict” by producing tensions between badness and sickness that still define interventions in the lives of people with substance use disorders.

My next book, Incapable: Guardianship and the History of Mental Capacity in the United States, which will be the first comprehensive history of guardianship from the colonial period to the present day, studies the creation, punishment, and control of mentally sick and disabled personhoods alongside and beyond carceral institutions.

Aspects of this research agenda also appear in published articles and book chapters in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the Law and History Review (in press), Teaching History, Nursing Clio (forthcoming), Minnesota Medicine, and Alcohol, Psychiatry, and Society: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives (Manchester University Press). This research has received fellowship and grant support from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Harvard Countway Library, the American Society for Legal History, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the New York State Archives.

PUBLICATIONS

“Incapable of Managing His Estate: Habitual Drunkards and the Expansion of Guardianship in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Law and History Review (in press, 2025).

“An Artificial Appetite: The Nineteenth-Century Struggle to Define Habitual Drunkenness,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 98, no. 2 (2024): 175-204.

“Corrupting the body and mind: distilled spirits, drunkenness, and disease in early-modern England and the British Atlantic world,” in Alcohol, psychiatry and society: Comparative and transnational perspectives, c. 1700-1990s, Waltraud Ernst and Thomas Müller, eds. (Manchester University Press, 2022), 36-65.

“Valuing Process over Product: Writing to Learn in the Undergraduate History Classroom,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods 46, no. 1 (2021): 10-22 [with Genesea M. Carter].

FORTHCOMING

“Drunkard,” in Breaking the Habit: An Introduction to How We Talk, and Shouldn’t Talk, about Addiction, edited by Helena Hansen, David Herzberg, and Keith Wailoo.

“Riding the Black Valley Railroad: Temperance Messaging in the Civil War Era,” The Substances of War: Alcohol, Drugs, and Medicine in the Civil War Era, edited by Joseph Beilein, Jr., Megan Bever, and Jonathan Jones.

PUBLIC WRITING

“Drunkenness, Guardianship, and Involuntary Commitment in the Strange Case of Henrietta Wiley,” Nursing Clio (forthcoming, 2025).

“Beyond Cardiac Surgery: Owen H. Wangensteen and the University of Minnesota’s Contributions to Mid-Century Surgical Science,” Minnesota Medicine (January/February 2018): 22-25.

INTERVIEWS

Jessica Comola, “COVID-19 and the History of Disease in Early America,” College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science, University of Denver, June 16, 2020.

Jake Steinberg, “Hear to stay: UMN faculty take to podcasting,” The Minnesota Daily, February 11, 2019.