Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.

My field of study is historical archaeology, a discipline that draws upon method and theory from cultural anthropology, history, and the natural sciences to investigate the development of the modern world through its physical traces in combination with other sources, including documents and oral histories. I am most interested in how and what material remains can tell us about the lived, embodied experiences of people neglected or misrepresented in written records, and my research has focused most upon nineteenth-century New York City.

My recently-published book, Irish Fever: An Archaeology of Illness, Injury, and Healing in New York City, 1845–1875 (University of Tennessee Press and Society for Historical Archaeology, 2024), is about the health-related experiences of Irish immigrants and centers upon three afflictions that disproportionately affected them, typhus fever (then called “Irish Fever”), work-related injuries, and tuberculosis. The book traces how medical ideas intersected with prejudices in somewhat surprising ways: Americans interpreted the visible effects of typhus fever and hard labor on Irish immigrant bodies as evidence of essential Irish difference, fueling dehumanizing stereotypes, while they reacted more sympathetically to those afflicted by tuberculosis. That all-too-familiar scourge enabled some Americans to recognize equal humanity in Irish sufferers. The book focuses equally on how Irish immigrants, themselves, responded, and draws on a combination of archaeological, folkloric, and documentary records to excavate their healing strategies, which included remedies originating in Ireland and commodities newly available to them in New York City.

My second major area of research is an ongoing, collaborative study of Seneca Village, a community founded by African Americans in 1825 that was displaced by the City of New York in 1857 to build Central Park. I co-authored the 2018 archaeological site report and several articles with Nan Rothschild and Diana diZerega Wall. I also co-created, with Gergely Baics, Leah Meisterlin, and Myles Zhang, Envisioning Seneca Village, a digital project that imagines what the village would have looked like shortly before its destruction. Currently, I am continuing to work on the digital project, writing a book about Seneca Village with Rothschild and Wall, and editing a soon-to-be-completed book about the archaeology of several different African American communities. That book, Revealing Communities: The Archaeology of Free African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, will be published in BGC’s Cultural Histories of the Material World Series, and it is an expansion of a symposium I organized at BGC in 2020.