My main academic field is nineteenth-century American cultural history.  I also study the history of science and material culture.

A few of my interests include:

• why and how certain ideas and types of knowledge become popular.
• the ways in which market society shapes knowledge.
• how knowledge is derived from physical objects.

Much of my work has centered on museums and natural history. My dissertation, The Phrenologists: Participatory Knowledge in Antebellum America, is about phrenology and the commercial circulation of new ideas about the self and mind from about 1830 to 1860.