History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Legal History | Alcohol, Drugs, and Addiction
I am an interdisciplinary historian whose research addresses the history of concepts like compulsion, mental capacity, and risk and how they shape productions of medical and legal personhood and define wellness and belonging in early America and the United States.
My research agenda is focused on explaining how scientific, medical, legal, and insurance systems work to govern people deemed to be problematic, especially individuals categorized as “addicts” or “insane” in the United States from its colonial beginnings through the end of the nineteenth century.
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska Omaha. I also serve as Secretary of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society. I hold a Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine from the University of Minnesota (2021).
CURRENT RESEARCH
In my first book project, Habitual Drunkard: Alcohol, Compulsion, and the Challenge to Nineteenth-Century American Democracy, I argue that a medicolegal quest to define, detect, and discipline compulsive drinkers across various branches of civil law, including guardianship (also known as conservatorship), divorce, and life insurance litigation, constructed the “habitual drunkard” as a new category of problematic person who anticipates the present-day “addict.”
Drunkards’ incapacity to care for their household dependents and property, participate in an emerging capitalist economy, and enact republican morality at the ballot box terrified legislatures, who empowered courts to strip them of their civil rights. Habitual drunkards put under guardianship lost their right to property, contract, will, and, in most states, vote. Having lost legal control over themselves, habitual drunkards also faced commitment to mental hospitals and, later, inebriate asylums. The dissolution of a marriage or exclusion from life insurance benefits further barred habitual drunkards from vital characteristics of belonging in a nascent middle class.
In an era of medical eclecticism and popular physiology, judges and jurors weighed expert medical testimony against their own knowledge of alcohol’s physical and mental effects as they struggled to differentiate between drinkers and drunkards one case at a time. The wide array of non-criminal consequences that habitual drunkards faced illuminates a complex biopolitics of compulsion that policed the borders of belonging and full citizenship before the twentieth-century federalization of drug control and the medicalization of addiction and its treatment. This book uncovers how medicolegal contests over the thresholds of alcohol-induced incapacity transformed the early American courtroom into a crucible that forged the modern addict by governing habitual drunkards.
FUTURE RESEARCH
My first book project anticipates the next two research trajectories. First, in Incapable: The Expansion of Guardianship in the United States, I will study the formation of concepts of mental capacity through the lens of adult guardianship in the United States from its early-modern and colonial origins through the end of the nineteenth century. Second, in Good and Bad Lives: Medicine, Insurance, and the Commodification of Life, I study the development of modern health insurance systems and the “preexisting condition” by examining the professionalization and practice of life insurance medicine before the twentieth century.
PUBLICATIONS
“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].
“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.
IN PROCESS
“Incapable of Managing His Estate: Habitual Drunkards and the Expansion of Guardianship in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Law and History Review [under review].
“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.
TEACHING
My teaching is centered on making historical knowledge accessible and relevant to students, scholars, and the public. I harness the power of writing, self-reflection, and collaborative learning to move beyond the memorization of names, events, and dates. Instead, I show that history is an active study and interpretation of historical documents and scholarship. I am deeply committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom by prioritizing underrepresented voices on the syllabus and assigning low-stakes and self-reflective writing so students can work with challenging new ideas without the fear of “getting it wrong.” I want students to leave my classroom with a greater appreciation for the complexity of historical analysis, sensitivity to silences and omissions in historical knowledge, and the ability to critically evaluate the reliability and significance of information. Ultimately, I strive to make historical knowledge accessible and relevant so that students become well-rounded, socially conscious citizens.
APPOINTMENTS
University of Nebraska at Omaha (2024-Present) Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of History
U.S. History to 1865 History of Medicine: From Antiquity to the Present Civil War and Reconstruction
