This blog is a catch-all for my own thoughts on history, culture, and the past, often in public and often in the present but not always so. Its title “circa” is intended as a gesture toward the lack of determinacy with which I view the past, of the necessarily partial truths we tell about it and my own partial understanding.
I am an associate professor of history at Georgia State University, where I teach public history, US history, and immigration and ethnic history. My research interests lie in immigration/ethnic studies, public history, oral history, urban studies, and material culture. I have published on nineteenth-century women’s clothing practices, on patterns of ethnicity in the mid-Atlantic, the representation of immigrants in public history and culture, and the impact of ethnic and immigrant communities on the urban cultural landscape. My book, Ethnic Renewal in Philadelphia’s Chinatown: Space, Place, and Struggle, was published in 2015 by Temple University Press.
My current project, Between Milltown to Model City: Race, Place, and Memory in Suburban Atlanta, explores how Blacks and whites imagined, crafted, maintained, and commemorated specific places over the course of the 20th century in two communities located east of the city of Atlanta: Scottdale and Avondale Estates. At the intersection of urban studies, historic preservation, memory, critical race theory, and southern history, this project considers key questions about how we dwell in real, imagined, and remembered spaces.
