MY PROJECTS

My book, The Choctaw Civil War: Justice and Sovereignty on the Franco-Choctaw Frontier (advance contract with the University of Alabama Press), examines an important moment in pre-Removal Choctaw history. Whereas previous historians have claimed that Choctaws grew to rely on French trade, I argue that it was the French who instead operated through dependency. Their imperial aspirations in Lower Louisiana were not possible without Choctaw military and diplomatic support, particularly in the Natchez and Chickasaw campaigns of the late 1720s and 1730s. This project uses ethnohistorical and linguistic research methods to consider how this war, waged between 1746-1750, challenged core Choctaw values of women’s work, iksa (“clan”) obligations, chiefly rule by consensus, and the generative power derived from trade and diplomacy. Choctaw miko (“headmen”) in time formulated their own foreign policies to the chagrin of the French, creating new visions of what Choctaw sovereignty should look like, and in the process throwing into question the colonial balance of power in the South. This work reminds us how contingency shaped colonial history and recalls a time when Native expressions of sovereignty determined the clamorous – if delusional – claims of European imperialism.

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Early in my graduate career at Auburn, I researched the effects of alcohol on industry (conceived of both as a commodity and as an attitude) in seventeenth-century Virginia. This built off a very small part of the M.A. thesis I completed at Virginia Tech in 2010, which examined the history of emotions during early English settlement attempts in the Chesapeake. 

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I've published book reviews in the Journal of Southern History, the Journal of Military History, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, History: Reviews of New Books, and on H-NET. In addition, I've had the pleasure of helping develop curriculum for several projects. The first was for elementary and high school teachers relating to the Native experience in the War of 1812 as part of Horseshoe Bend National Military Park's Bicentennial Celebration. More recently, I participated in the NEH "Revolution in Books" summer teaching institute where I developed a unit on smallpox in the era of the American Revolution using the materials available at FAU's Marvin & Sybil Weiner Spirit of America Collection. 

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​At Southeastern Oklahoma State University, I combine research with service, having edited and co-directed the school's biannual Native American Research Symposium since 2019.