Research Interests
My research agenda centers on a desire to understand and historicize the various relationships between domestic and global economic transformations, political and social identities, urban space, cultural meaning, and everyday experiences of work and labor. My first book manuscript is entitled The Servicing of America: Service Work, Political Economy, and the Making of the Modern United States. The book details the cultural, social, political, and economic consequences of the transformation of the United States from an industrial economy to a so-called service economy. Focusing on the capitalization of service industries, the commodification of women's "traditional" household labor, post-1965 immigration, the economic thought of 1960s social movements, and the decline of the American labor movement, amongst other problematics, I show how the rise of the so-called service economy represented the largest shift in social cognition and economic and cultural value since the industrialization of the late 1800s. In the final analysis, the book argues that in the fifty years following the end of World War II, America was increasingly "serviced," as relationships of reproduction, culture, social status, progress, and identity became ever more ensconced in the market through the the capitalization of everyday life, the labor of service workers, and the purchase of services.

More recently, I have begun researching two long-term projects that are grounded in New Orleans and the Gulf South. The first looks at changes in political economy and class relations in New Orleans from juridical integration through the post-Katrina era. The main thrust of this book length project is tracing the development of an interracial managerial and development class in the city and its consolidation around neoliberal political, cultural, and economic imperatives in the decade before, and five years after Hurricane Katrina. Preliminary research from this project will be published in an edited collection entitled From American Sodom to American Phoenix

The second project analyzes the labor, economic, and cultural history of the Gulf Coast petroleum industry in the 20th century and especially this industry's relationship to global and national economic, cultural, and environmental crises after 1973. The initial research from this project deals with legal and environmental challenges to drilling rights on the Louisiana Gulf Coast between the 1920s and 1970s.

Teaching Interests
While my research focuses on the 20th Century U.S. broadly conceived, my courses generally cover thematic subjects that span the larger swath of U.S. history. At Tulane I teach courses on urban history, market culture, American social movements, postwar America, legal history, the history of capitalism, the history of the present, economic depressions and crises, and U.S. historiography.