I am an Assistant Dean and Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia. A historian, I Co-Chaired the UVA President’s Commission on Slavery and led its research project fro 2013 to 2018. I now co-chair the UVA President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation. Connected to that work, since 2016, I have been the managing director of Universities Studying Slavery, a UVA-led consortium of nearly seventy schools in five countries. Since 2019, I have managed the University of Virginia’s evolving research and outreach project to the descendants of those enslaved at the school.

My first book, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia, examined the struggles of free Black people as they sought security, economic success, community, and rights in Virginia’s slave society. I was lead scholarly researcher and a lead author on the 2018 President’s Commission on Slavery Report to President Teresa A. Sullivan. I’m also a contributing author to the edited 2019 volume, Educated in Tyranny: Slavery at Jefferson’s University. In March 2024, the University of Virginia Press published After Emancipation: Racism & Resistance at the University of Virginia, a book I co-edited with my President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation co-chair Andrea Douglas . After Emancipation examines the University of Virginia’s difficult history after 1865—including Lost Cause mythologizing, Anti-Black racism, Native American erasure, racial terrorism, segregation—while highlighting the persistence of their Black neighbors in building community and struggling to defend freedom. It also acknowledges slavery’s powerful afterlives in centering the voices of twenty-first century people of color as they respond to the hard histories revealed within.

Since 2012, I have also led the Jefferson’s University: The Early Life Project (JUEL), a major digital humanities initiative. Bringing together a trove of personal and administrative documents, as well as archival images of the university and three-dimensional digital renderings, JUEL invites users to discover the people and places of the University’s early years, stretching from its founding in 1819 through the end of the Civil War.

By virtue of all that public-facing and community-engaged work, I have become a historian working in public. In addition to my continuing research on the University of Virginia’s history of human bondage and racism, I consult with schools embarking on truth-telling and reconciliation projects of their own, sharing best practices and guiding principles developed over the past decade of professional endeavor in Virginia.