I am a historian of the modern United States interested in the history of ideas, the history of the state, and the history of capitalism. My book project offers the first history of how the concept of bureaucracy developed in the modern United States. Looking to discourses in social science, politics, business, and popular culture, it considers how Americans’ ideas about bureaucracy changed over time and contributed to the major political economic shifts of the period. More than merely an organizational form, bureaucracy—as a symbol of the tensions between impersonality and instrumentalism and community and self in the modern world—was a concept at the heart of Americans’ efforts toward democracy, merit, and equality and their attempts to create institutions that supported these values. By centering it, my research historicizes Americans’ contemporary antipathy toward bureaucracy and shows how it undergirded the major developments in modern American history, including the rise and fall of the underpinnings of American liberalism—an empowered federal state, Fordist corporations, and powerful labor unions—and the rise of neoliberal ideas in their wake.
In 2024, I defended my dissertation, “Conceptualizing ‘The Iron Cage’: Bureaucracy in Modern America” — which won the Leo P. Ribuffo Prize for the best dissertation in U.S. Intellectual History — in the History Department at Princeton University. Before that, I received my B.A. in Political & Social Thought at the University of Virginia. I am interested in interdisciplinary teaching and writing pedagogy and have enjoyed working with students in Hopkins’ Moral & Political Economy Program and Princeton’s Freshman Scholars Institute, Writing Program, and Prison Teaching Initiative.
I can be reached at [email protected].