I am a historian of the United States in the 20th century, studying policing, politics, and political economy.

My research explores how the contingent and contested processes of class formation and racial formation shape struggles over politics, citizenship, and state building. My current project—The Labor of Law and Order: How Police Unions Transformed Policing and Politics in the United States, 1939-1985—studies the process by which rank-and-file police officers organized through unions and other associations to reshape police practices and urban politics in the decades following World War II. I show how police unionists won the political and cultural power they enjoy today and how they exercised their labor power to constitute a new political order in the final decades of the twentieth century.

I teach at NYU and previously taught at Harvard, where I also received my Ph.D. in 2021. I offer survey and specialty courses in modern U.S. history, covering political history, labor history, African-American history, carceral history, and the history of capitalism.