Unlike any students who have ever taken my introductory survey to American history, I became a historian partly because I was inspired by my US History professor, A.R. Riggs. While my father's deep love for history was infectious and I come from a long line of storytellers, that first-year class sealed my fate. Fleeing my hometown of Boston, drenched in early American history, for Montreal, I managed to become an American citizen majoring in American history in Quebec after a mere two weeks in my initial major, psychology.
After a B.A. in History from McGill University in 1988, I began graduate school in Edinburgh, Scotland, but the haggis smell from the butcher below my apartment forced me back across the Atlantic. I received my PhD from Boston University in 1996, taught at Boston University and Harvard University for two years as a visiting professor, and then began a fellowship under the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Since coming to SUNY Potsdam in 2001, I have taught courses in Medical History, Historical methodology, Early America, Revolutionary America, Witchcraft, and Early American Indigenous History.
I have completed two books: Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America (2024) and The Correspondence of John Cotton, Jr, 1640-1699 (2009). I have also published articles about early American letters, newspapers, funeral gloves, penmanship, and letter-writing manuals. My ongoing book project -- The Culture of Correspondence: Letter-writing in Early New England -- seeks to understand how letters function within culture, and explores the intersections among oral, written, and print forms of communication.