Overview
I am a PhD candidate studying twentieth-century United States and Canadian history. Focusing on sport as spaces where race and power are made and negotiated, my research explores citizenship, borders, state-making, diaspora, and empire.
Committee: Lawrence Glickman (Chair), Jon Parmenter, Tamika Nunley, Ruth Lawlor
Research Focus
My dissertation, Chasing Canaan: The United States, Canada, and the Quest for an Athletic Promised Land, unsettles long standing historical narratives of US-Canada relations, the border, and race-making in Canada. Using four case studies – Black Montreal, Japanese Vancouver, the Prairies, and Indigenous boarding and residential schools – my research traces the experiences of athletes as they move across the border, through these centers of gravity, to offer a social history of the US-Canada borderland. By braiding together these often-siloed histories, my dissertation links the social and political experiences of transnational athletes to offer a new rendering of Canadian-American relations through the entangled histories of freedom, slavery, migration, dispossession, and citizenship making.
Based on archival research from across the US and Canada, my project considers how the enduring relationship of slavery and freedom informed how border-crossers encountered, experienced, and challenged the myth of Canadian benevolence against the backdrop of American racism. While the myth of Canadian refuge endures partly because of Canada’s proximity to a racially hostile US, I challenge the conventional directionality of freedom as northward and uncover how sports were both a site of exclusion and a place for freedom and self-making.
My research, writing, and teaching have been supported by several programs and offices at Cornell (History Department, Graduate School, Knight Writing Institute), by the North American Society for Sport History, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2023 I received the Deanne Gebell Gitner ’66 and Family Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants. In the spring of 2023, I taught the seminar “United States History through Novels,” that considered the relationship between fiction, history, and the production of knowledge.
Publications
Articles:
“Assimilationist Athletics: Indian Boarding Schools, Sports, and the American Empire.” Journal of Sport History 48, no. 1 (2021): 1-16.
Reviews:
Tod Hamilton, Immigration and the Remaking of Black America (New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 2019) Journal of American Ethnic History 41, no. 3 (Spring 2022): 130-132.
Michelle Johnson and Funké Aladejebi (eds.), Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022) American Review of Canadian Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter 2022): 510-11.
Other:
“Killing in the Age of Air Jordan,” in The 1980s: Politics, Culture, and Memory. Cornell Public History Initiative Blog Post and Digital Exhibition.