I write mostly (but not exclusively) on race and memory in the American south.

Written with a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Remembering Emmett Till tells the complete story of Emmett Till’s commemoration in the Mississippi Delta.

Remembering Emmett Till was reviewed in the New York Review of Books (cover story), was listed as a 2019 book-of-the-year by The Economist, won the 2021 Byron Caldwell Smith book award, and formed the basis for a Smithsonian exhibition.

“This may be the single greatest ‘history of memory’ I have ever read.” - James Young, author of The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Spaces Between

Articles, Features, and Op-Eds

Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America revolutionizes how we think about confession and its ubiquitous place in American culture. It argues that the sheer act of labeling a text a confession has become one of the most powerful, and most overlooked, forms of intervening in American cultural politics. In the twentieth century alone, the genre of confession has profoundly shaped (and been shaped by) six of America’s most intractable cultural issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy.