Expertise

British History, British Empire History, Atlantic History, Eighteenth-Century History, Colonial British America

Biography

I have taught at Temple University since 2006, after receiving my PhD from Columbia University. I am the author of the book Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World, which examines the attempts made by members of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) to convert enslaved people to Christianity and the impact this program had on wider debates about race, slavery, and abolition. My other publications include articles on the history of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world that have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of British Studies.

My current book project examines the experiences of people around the British Empire who were neither ardent patriots nor ardent loyalists during the American Revolution. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the history of Britain and the British Empire, Atlantic history, European history, and the history of slavery, among other subjects. I have received fellowships from the Huntington Library, the John Carter Brown Library, the Harvard University Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, the Whiting Foundation, and a Beveridge Research Grant from the American Historical Association. I also currently serve as the Treasurer and a member of the Executive Committee of the North American Conference on British Studies.

Selected Publications

Book 

• Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2012). ISBN: 978-0199773961

Articles 

• “Protestantism in the Early South,” Journal of Southern Religion, 14 (2012).
• “‘Baptism doth not bestow Freedom’: Missionary Anglicanism, Slavery, and the Yorke-Talbot Opinion, 1701—30,” William and Mary Quarterly, 67, no. 2 (April 2010).
• “Missionaries, Methodists, and a Ghost: Philip Quaque in London and Cape Coast, 1756-1816,” Journal of British Studies, 48, no. 1 (January 2009).

Bibliographic Article

• “The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts,” Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic History (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Courses Taught

• History of Britain, 1688-1832 (Hist 3332)
• History of Britain, 1832 – Present (Hist 3333)
• Intermediate Writing Seminar in European History: Atlantic Revolutions (Hist 3496)
• Capstone Writing Seminar in European History: The British Empire (Hist 4497)
• Capstone Writing Seminar in American History: The American Revolution and the World (Hist 4296)
• Global Slavery (Hist 0861)
• Graduate Seminar in Atlantic History (Hist 8302)
• Graduate Seminar in Eighteenth-Century British History (Hist 5480)