I am a writer and historian of US foreign relations / United States and the World / [future field descriptor]. My work explores colonial empire, transimperial and transnational exchanges, violence, and American power in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. I research and teach at the University of Glasgow.

My first book, Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World, interrogated four decades of US colonial rule in the Southern Philippines. You can purchase it here (US edition) or here (PI edition). It was a finalist for a Philippine National Book Award. For scholarship and teaching connected to this project, I was awarded the 2022 Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

I am presently co-editing a volume with Karine Walther - The Gospel of Work and Money: Industrial Education and its Global Legacies - on the global outgrowths of industrial education in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. It is under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press and will appear in the series Power, Politics, and the World in 2025.

My next monograph, Mohonk: The Making of America’s Pedagogical Empire, is a global microhistory of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian and Other Dependent Peoples.

This is my CV if you’d like to know me in digestible factsheet format. Email me about anything and everything.

Here is some of my other writing:

Journal Articles: Teaching the World to Work (Bernath Lecture) | Colonizing Workers | A New West in Mindanao | Visiting the Metropole

Book Chapters: Logics of Immersion | Locating Empire | The Permeable South

Other: The Wild West of Scotland

Recent Reviews: Sarah Steinbock-Pratt - Educating the Empire | John T. Sidel - Republicanism, Communism, Islam | Colleen Woods - Freedom Incorporated | John Scott Reed - The US Volunteers in the Southern Philippines | Daniel Immerwahr - How to Hide an Empire (Roundtable)