I am a historian of American music and currently a Robert M. Kingdon Fellow in the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My research concerns the social lives of music: how sound gathers force in ordinary experiences, moves across space and time, and organizes feeling, attention, and power. I specialize in nineteenth-century U.S. musical culture, with particular attention to vernacular sacred song and the infrastructures that shaped it, including print, pedagogy, and institutions that promoted public singing. My current book project, The Gospel in Black and White: Race and Popular Culture in American Hymns, traces the formation of gospel music between 1875 and 1915. It shows how gospel emerged from overlapping Black and white evangelical circuits of publishing, performance, and listening, and treats hymnbooks and songbooks as material archives that both produced and preserved cultural categories like race. More broadly, I write across American music history from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, with interests in race and racialization, media history before recording, and sacred music as a central part of popular culture. I received a PhD in Music from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, where I also taught, and have taught at the University of Delaware. I am also an organist and choral conductor.

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