Department webpage

I am a social and cultural historian of the United States, focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My first book, Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans (University of Chicago Press, 2017), is a history of mainstream daily newspapers and the cities they served. This history looks beyond newspapers’ front pages to much-loved features such as the sports page, the metropolitan section, the Sunday magazine, and the comic strips.  I show that newspapers did not just report on cities, but truly helped to build them by hosting marketplaces, waging civic campaigns, and teaching readers new urban habits.  In other words: cities made newspapers, but newspapers also made cities. 

I lecture and supervise for Part I Paper 24 (American History from 1865 to the present), I teach Part II Paper 26 (Consumption and Consumer Culture in the United States), and I supervise Part II dissertations on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history.  I am on research leave from January through August 2019.