At Wilkes University, I teach courses for history majors and non-majors alike.  My upper-level courses examine American history from the colonial period through the American Civil War and Reconstruction. I also offer the core course in Wilkes’s Public History concentration.  Students in my upper-level courses have also been able to experiment with public-facing history projects.

Survey courses offered each semester:

• HST 101: Historical Foundations of the Modern World – A core requirement for all Wilkes students, this course examines the development of modern Europe and its relationship to the world.
• HST 125: U.S. History to 1877, with WGS credit* – This course considers the history of the North American continent from the meeting of indigenous societies and Columbus through Reconstruction.

Upper-level courses taught since 2019:

• HST 211: Introduction to Public History – A core requirement for Wilkes students with public and digital history concentrations, this course introduces students to how public history differs from “academic” history, who makes it happen and how, and who consumes it.  First offered during the Fall 2020 semester, HST 211 students collected and preserved materials for a “Wilkes in 2020” collection that was donated to the Wilkes University Archives.  In Spring 2023, HST 211 students curated an exhibition, “Wilkes at 90,” that was mounted in the Farley Library to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the school’s founding.
• HST 326: The History and Memory of the American Civil War, with WGS credit – This course examines the American Civil War through a broad lens, starting with the U.S. Constitution and ending with recent debates about monuments and commemoration.
• HST 329: American Women’s History, with WGS credit – What/who women should be has been up for debate for centuries; students in this course explore how both the law and popular media (books, essays, images, popular culture, etc) have shaped and responded to those debates.
• HST 331: Colonial America, with WGS credit – This course explores interactions across a “vast early America” that included indigenous, European, and African peoples in places like the Caribbean, the East Coast, and the Southwest from the 1500s through the mid-1700s.
• HST 332: The New Nation, with WGS credit – HST 332 looks at the political, economic, social, and cultural developments in the United States from the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783 through the establishment of an industrialized North and a cotton-producing South, roughly 1840.
• HST 398: From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: A History of Media, with WGS credit– In 1424, people could live their entire lives and only receive information by word-of-mouth; in 2024, we carry small computers in our pockets and can read texts, watch videos, stream movies, and talk with people on the other side of the earth.  This course does not cover the 600 years between those two points comprehensively, but it does offer students the opportunity to explore the development of the printing press and how the introduction of print media has shaped Americans’ politics, culture, and daily life.
• HST 397: Senior Capstone Seminar – Students select topics, develop research questions, and conduct research on relevant primary and secondary sources.  By the end of the semester, each student-historian has produced a significant piece of writing as well as presented their research findings to a public audience.

* Wilkes University offers a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies, and students can take courses from a variety of disciplines.  Approved courses for the minor must demonstrate that students will examine differences in gender, race, class, ethnicity, and other systems of power and authority.  Many of my courses have been approved for WGS credit.

At the University of Connecticut, I taught the survey course, “United States History to 1877,” and an upper-division course, “Colonial America, 1492-1763.”  Both of these were “writing-intensive” courses, in which the students were required to write and revise a minimum of 15 pages.

During the spring 2018 semester, students in my “Colonial America, 1492-1763” upper-level course contributed to a course blog.  You can read their contributions at Colonial American Histories.