Education:

BA, University of Dayton, magna cum laude, 2006
MA, U.S. History, University of Cincinnati, 2009

• Thesis: "Swill Milk in the 'Metropolis of Malt': Cincinnati Physicians and the Fight to End Distillery Dairies, 1850-1920"

Research Interests:

In general, I am interested in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of the United States, with a specific focus on the social and cultural history of "drugs" - the opiates, cocaine, cannabis, etc. as both licit and illicit substances. Specifically, their paths to demonization and criminalization, their association with vice, bodily and moral decay, and especially the methods and practices used by governments, police, medicine, and society at-large to characterize, stigmatize, and control these substances over the past hundred and fifty years.

My dissertation aims to fill a major lacuna in the historiography on marijuana prohibition in the United States by exploring the origins and transformations of the regulatory processes, medical discourse, and social concerns that controlled cannabis at the state and local level from the late nineteenth century until the federal government’s passage of the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937. This research is particularly crucial, because unlike the opiates and cocaine, cannabis was excluded from the nation’s first major prohibitive drug legislation (the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914), leaving individual states responsible for the construction, passage, and enforcement of prohibitive measures related to cannabis use until 1937. As such, I seek to answer a number of major questions about how and why cities and states across the country regulated cannabis before the federal government, and what affect, if any, these complex processes had on each other and the emergence and development of subsequent federal regulation.

Fellowships and Awards

• Graduate Fellow, Clough Center For Constitutional Democracy
• University Fellowship, Boston College

Papers Presented:

• "'Not a ragamuffin among them': Anti-Opium Legislation and the Demise of Boston's 'Gilded Dens,'" Presented at The Pub, the Street, and the Medicine Cabinet: The 6th International Conference on the History of Alcohol and Drugs at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), June 24-26, 2011.
• [Invited] “Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Alcohol and Drug Prohibition Movements,” Presented to Boston Public School's - Teaching American History (TAH) Grant Program on Liberty, Equality and E Pluribus Unum, at Boston University, February 24, 2010.
• “Swill Milk in the ‘Metropolis of Malt’: Cincinnati Physicians and the Fight to End Distillery Dairies, 1850- 1920.” Presented at the Queen City Colloquium History Graduate Conference, University of Cincinnati, June 5, 2009.
• “Jobs, Peace, Freedom: The ‘Ever-Normal’ Notions of Henry A. Wallace.” Paper Presented at the Queen City Colloquium History Graduate Conference, University of Cincinnati, June 6, 2008.