His research explores the ways in which Americans thought about constitutions, and the U.S. Constitution, in the Nineteenth-century. His current book project, “The Spirit of Those Times: The Antebellum Origins of the Modern U.S. Constitution” examines the ways in which debates over slavery in the District of Columbia shaped attitudes to the American Constitution that inform contemporary constitutional debates. Before teaching at Bard College, he taught at Ithaca College and studied in the U.S. and U.K.