I am a historian of the United States with an emphasis on the nineteenth century, imperialism, race, gender, and sexuality. Trained in U.S. and Japanese institutions, I have always taken comparative and transnational approaches in my study of history. 

My first book, Tropical Freedom: Climate, Settler Colonialism, and Black Exclusion in the Age of Emancipation (Duke, 2017), argues that during the late eighteenth and mid nineteenth centuries British and American expansionists and free black activists produced different imaginings of an Atlantic world that variously and often contrastingly mapped black freedom within its geographic bounds and that these conflicting geographies of race and freedom became inseparably intertwined with U.S. and British North American settler colonial formations.  Importantly, both promoters and protesters of geographic management of race employed tropes of domesticity and intra-racial reproduction as well as climatic idioms born of the centuries-long development of the plantation economies in the Americas. These languages not only underpinned legal, political, and ideological initiatives to exclude free blacks from settler colonial privileges but also suffused free black politics against them.    

I am currently working on two projects: tracing the origins of US insular imperialism and investigating the influence of the United States’ expansion into East Asia on domestic racial formations and on the development of Japanese racial identity.