I am a historian who studies slavery, emancipation, and political economy in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe with a particular focus on France and its empire. My research broadly explores how financial speculation and sovereign debt shaped imperial expansion and became key elements of the early modern and modern world.

I currently hold the Simmons Center for Slavery and Justice and the John Carter Brown Library joint postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University. Before coming to Brown, I earned my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.

I am working on a book manuscript that addresses the specific case of the 1825 Haitian Indemnity, the debt imposed by France on Haiti as a condition for recognizing its sovereignty. The project uses manuscript, published, and material sources from more than thirty public and private archives and libraries in Europe, North America, and the Caribbean to tell a new, archivally grounded history of finance and empire. In it, I take the particular case of Haiti's sovereign debt in the long nineteenth century and argue for the international significance of the debt for private banks, monetary systems, nation-making, abolitionist programs, and political thought in Europe and the rest of the world. 

Insofar as my work is broadly engaged with global conversations on reparations, representation, and repatriation, I am also interested in curatorial and artistic practices that link the economic histories of slavery and emancipation to the visual cultures of modernity. My writing about art and history has been published in The American Historical Review, History and Theory, and Slavery & Abolition, among others.