My book manuscript Made for You and Me: American Land and the Long Nineteenth Century is an inquiry into what I call the politics of the “ordinary." This refers to both a ubiquitous and taken-for-granted object of study - land - and texts that are pedestrian, popular, or low-brow, when compared to the tracts and treatises typically privileged by political theorists. I examine treaties, council minutes, letters, autobiographies, speeches, and even children's novels to demonstrate how various conceptualizations of land configure, constellate, and articulate a politics of sovereignty, freedom, and nationhood. Consisting of chapter on Thomas Jefferson and William Henry Harrison, Black Hawk (Sauk), ​the 1852 U.S. Congress, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Zitkala-Ša (Yankton Lakota), and W.E.B. Du Bois, this book contribute to a growing literature that critiques the core ideas, thinkers, and narratives of American political thought from a postcolonial perspective, as well as to the unearthing of intellectual resources for rethinking the use, tenure, and distribution of land in a climate-changed world.

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My second book-length project continues this examination of the “ordinary". Tentatively titled Paths of Resistance: Settler Colonialism and the Politics of American Transit, I will explore how the policies and ideology of the settler state both coopted and erased Indigenous patterns of movement, thereby shaping the meanings of freedom, commerce, and place. Yet, I will also recover how Native Americans have existed within, responded to, and resisted settler space-making in ways that complicate the vast cultural construction that is the U.S. transit system. Drawing upon research in environmental history, spatial justice, and settler colonial studies, the project will feature chapters on river travel in the early republic (i.e. Thomas Jefferson’s meticulous study of North American waterways and Black Buffalo’s (Brulé Lakota) encounter with the Corps of Discovery Expedition), the expansion of the railroads in the nineteenth century, the creation of the interstate highway system in the mid-twentieth century, and the advent of passenger flight.​