An historian of the nineteenth-century United States, he specializes in African American history. Prior to joining UC Davis in 2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow in global American studies at Harvard University. He is at work on his first book, Freedoms Limit: Racial Capitalism and the Afterlives of Slavery. His research focuses on 19th-century United States; African American history; intellectual history; slavery and abolition; the Atlantic World; comparative histories of empire; the history of capitalism.