Welcome. I am a historian of American religion and the nineteenth-century United States, often using computational methods for texts and maps. I am an associate professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, as well as one of the faculty directors at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media.
If you are interested in following my writing or other work, there are a few places you can find it. Short updates and links posts go on my old-school weblog (or new-school microblog, however you prefer to think about it). This website has a blog for longer, more permanent posts. Here is a page where you can read about what I am currently working on over the next month and semester.
Useful links. Things you might be looking for:
You can also subscribe to “Working on It,” an occasional newsletter about American religious history, digital history, and the making thereof.
Scholarship. Here are some things I’ve worked on:
- John Turner and I are working with a team at RRCHNM on a project we call American Religious Ecologies. We are currently working on digitizing the 1926 Census of Religious Bodies.
- America’s Public Bible: A Commentary is a large-scale text analysis of the use of the Bible in American newspapers. A prototype of the project is available online, and I’m working on an expanded version.
- Kellen Funk and I wrote an article called “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” Someday we will do more with digital legal history.
- The Chance of Salvation: A History of Conversion in America was published by Harvard University Press in 2017.
- Nothing else I ever do will be as popular as this map of American slavery.
The rest of my published work is listed here. Preprints are available at my Humanities Commons page. Software or data analysis repositories are available at GitHub. The other appurtenances of scholarship: ORCID, Zotero, Google Scholar.
Teaching. I teach courses on American religious history, the history of Christianity, the nineteenth-century United States, and digital history. Here are the syllabi.