Welcome!

I am a historian of slavery and abolition in the United States and Atlantic World and am currently McDonald-Boswell Associate Professor at Erskine College.

My first book, The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage, was published by Yale University Press in 2020. The book has been described as “a remarkable piece of scholarship” (The New Republic), “gripping” (The New York Review of Books), and “timely” (The Nation).

My next book is a biography of America’s spy-abolitionist, Emilio Sanchez, who worked undercover for the British in New York, reporting on the illegal slave trade in the United States and Cuba during the Civil War era. For more on Sanchez, see my article in Smithsonian Magazine. I am represented by literary agent Deirdre Mullane for this project.

I am originally from Northern Ireland and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at Queen’s University Belfast. I immigrated to the United States in 2008 and worked as a public historian in Charleston, South Carolina before completing Ph.D. in history at Johns Hopkins University. I have taught intensively for 7 years in my current position and have been awarded several prizes for excellence in teaching.