About
I am currently a Professor of American History at Stony Brook University. I specialize in the labor history of the arts. My first book, *Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth-Century New York* (Penn Press, 2008) recovers the experiences and aspirations of the thousands of young women who, aided by radical artisans and the Ruskinian “Unity of Art” ideal, headed to New York to pursue careers as professional artists in an emerging industrial society that extolled masculine genius and exploited women’s labor. I have published essays on the Jacksonian-era genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer, the overlooked contributions of artists’ models, the pitfalls of writing interdisciplinary history, the art and sport of challenge dancing, and the joys of teaching history through dance. In 2021 and 2022, I won the AHA's Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching for my unique research seminar in which students learn to waltz, ring shout, swing, jig, and salsa to complement their archival study of the people, places, and periods that produced these dances. My second book, *Diamond and Juba: The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing* is due out with the University of Illinois Press in December 2025.
Featured Work
Diamond and Juba: The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing
Diamond and Juba: The Raucous World of 19th-Century Challenge Dancing reconstructs the lives of two extraordinary jig dancers: the small and pugnacious Irish American John Diamond and the comely and clever African American William Henry Lane, aka Juba. These young men were buffeted by the same events that affected other working people in antebellum America—war, riot, depression, and the sectional crisis. But unlike most of their peers they managed to escape poverty through the art and sport of challenge dancing. Promoted as a masculine art with close ties to boxing, challenge dancing featured prolific gambling, hefty purses, and championship belts, yet also included women competitors, cross-dressing, and blackface. Diamond and Juba achieved national and international celebrity by issuing boastful challenges in the press and dancing matches on the stage. In the process, they created a “purely American” style of dance that can still be seen in today’s tap, step, hip hop, and breakdancing.
Interweaving biography and history, Diamond and Juba follows these two dancers from New York’s ethnically diverse streets and dockside markets, where as boys they were discovered by entertainment huckster P. T. Barnum, into cellar taverns and dance houses where Charles Dickens witnessed Juba’s dancing, and ultimately onto the glittering stages of theaters, pleasure gardens, circuses, music halls, and minstrel houses across the United States and Britain. The book takes this celebrated rivalry as its subject in order to shed light on the worlds in which they labored as dancers, rescue challenge dancing from its ill-deserved obscurity, recover the interracial origins of American popular culture, and reconstruct the porous and generative social lives of free Black and poor white people in the tumultuous years before the Civil War.
