Overview
I am a cultural and social historian of the United States with a particular interest in the "long" 19th century and the histories of time, the law, and visual culture. Before joining Cornell, I was Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. After a short career as a journalist, I received my Ph.D. at the University of Southern California in 2014 under the supervision of Karen Halttunen. My research articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of American History, New England Quarterly, Time & Society, and Early Popular Visual Culture, among other academic journals.
My first book, City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture (UNC Press, 2018), explored the cultural effects of the gentrification of 19th-century Boston, the self-proclaimed "Athens of America." I show that elite-led reforms of the city's landscape inadvertently sparked cultural rebellion among working- and middle-class blind mesmerists, amateur artists, Spiritualists, and Transcendentalists, all of whom claimed to see what more refined spectators could not. This rebellion, I argue, helped give rise to the modern spectator, perceptually emancipated yet psychologically alienated.
My current monograph, The Clockwork Republic (under contract with UNC Press), examines another democratic contest in the early republic, this time over the law's temporal reach: its power to impose debts, obligations, and other restraints on the future. Whereas colonial society had limited most forms of obligations to a chapter (or at most the entirety) of the human life cycle, the early republic's financial revolution empowered creditors, speculators, and property owners to extend their grasp to future forms of property: unborn slaves, lands still held by the indigenous, corporate dividends, devises, and rents. In reaction, anti-rent activists, agrarian dissenters, debtors, labor leaders, and others across sections and political divide embraced the "politics of immediatism," figuratively and sometimes literally burning constitutions, contracts, slave deeds, and leases in the name of what Frederick Douglass called "the ever-living now."
Research Focus
- Cultural History
- Social History
- History of Time
- History of Visual Culture
- History of Law
Awards and Honors
- National Humanities Center Fellow, The Clockwork Republic (2023-24)
- Australia National University Humanities Research Centre Fellow, The Crisis of the Present in the American Cultural Imagination (2019)
- Best Article Award, American Journalism Historians Association (2017)
Publications
Monographs
City of Second Sight: Nineteenth-Century Boston and the Making of American Visual Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
The Clockwork Republic: Sociolegal Culture, Time, and Struggle in the United States, 1787-1860 (under contract with University of North Carolina Press).
Edited Volume
A Cultural History of Time in the Age of Empire and Industry (New York: Bloomsbury, 2026). [Volume 5 of Bloomsbury's six-volume A Cultural History of Time series, edited by Nick Yablon]
Special Issue
Alexis McCrossen and Justin Clark, eds., “Seeing Time,” Early Popular Visual Culture, May 2022.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“Souls in Debt: The Transformation of Carceral Punishment in Early Eighteenth-Century New England,” Journal of American History (accepted).
“The Visual in 19th Century American Popular Culture,” in The Cambridge History of American Popular Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
“Can We Teach Undergraduates the History of Time?,” Time & Society, July 2022.
“Seeing Time,” Early Popular Visual Culture, May 2022. [co-authored with Alexis McCrossen]
“Deploying ‘all-important moments’: Seeing Time in Duke University’s Collections of Early North American Advertisements,” Early Popular Visual Culture 19, May 2022. [co-authored with Alexis McCrossen]
“Motionless Pictures: The Waiting Public in Popular American Visual Culture, 1870-1930,” Early Popular Visual Culture, May 2022.
“The Secret of Quick Thinking: The Invention of Mental Speed in America, 1890-1920,” Time & Society, May 2020.
“From Global City to ‘City of Villages’: Tracing the State Discourse of Cosmopolitanism in Modern Singaporean History,” Journal of Intercultural Studies, July 2019.
“American Studies in Singapore,” Journal of American Studies, August 2018.
“Confronting the ‘Seeker of Newspaper Notoriety’: Pathological Lying, the Public, and the Press, 1890-1920,” American Journalism, May 2017.
“The Origins of Blind Autobiography in Visionary Antebellum New England,” The New England Quarterly, June 2014.
Recent Book Reviews and Review Essays
“Objects and Rituals of Time in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Reviews in American History, June 2022.
Mark Braude, Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris, Los Angeles Review of Books, September 20, 2022.
Robin Hemley, Borderline Citizen: Dispatches from the Outskirts of Nationhood, Los Angeles Review of Books, April 22, 2020.
Peter J. Brownlee, The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum America, American Historical Review, February 2020.
Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism, Reviews in American History, June 2019.
William Krister Knapp, William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, January 2018.
Corey Pein, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 11, 2018.
Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, LA Review of Books, April 4, 2018.
Historical Novel
The Zero Season (Penguin Books, 2022)
HIST Courses - Fall 2024
- HIST 1411 : FWS: Facts, Frauds, and Rumors: (Un)Truth in Western History
- HIST 2001 : Supervised Reading - Undergraduate
- HIST 2631 : The Global History of Time
- HIST 3002 : Supervised Research - Undergraduate