Ph.D.   History, Brown University, Providence, RI
M.A.    History, Brown University, Providence, RI
B.A.     History, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA
History and Cultural Anthropology, Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany

I am an early American historian with a particular focus on the Revolution and early republic. I am especially interested in the intersections of language, class, patriotism, and gender during this period. My first book, The Trial of Frederick Eberle, uses the 1816 trial of fifty-nine German Americans as a prism through which to explore prevalent notions of citizenship, language, and patriotism in the first four decades after the Revolution. My current research project focuses on the unusual experiences of a German general's wife who spent the years from 1777 to 1783 in North America, most of them as an American prisoner of war.

I am also a certified archivist. Before joining Penn State, I was the Research Collections Librarian at the German Society of Pennsylvania and the Fraktur Scholar for the Fraktur Collection Digitization Project at the Free Library of Philadelphia. As an NEH Project Archivist at the American Philosophical Society, I worked on a project to convert the Society's detailed manuscript card catalog into fully searchable EAD finding aids

The Trial of Frederick Eberle: Language, Patriotism and Citizenship in Philadelphia’s German Community, 1790-1830 (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
* Winner, 2011 St. Paul’s, Biglerville Prize for best book in Lutheran church history

“They ‘Speak Irish but Should Speak German’: Language and Citizenship in Philadelphia’s German Community, c. 1800-1820,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 128, No. 1 (January 2004): 5-33.

Colonial America; the American Revolution; Jeffersonian and Jacksonian America; American urban history; American immigration; public history; archives.

Spletzer Family Foundation Research Grant in German-Canadian Studies, University of Winnipeg
Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati Fellowship
German Historical Institute Research Fellowship
The John Nicholas Brown Center for the Study of American Civilization Fellowship
Spencer Foundation Mentor Program Research Grant
David Library of the American Revolution Research Fellowship
Frances Lewis Fellowship in Gender and Women’s Studies, Virginia Historical Society
Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Fellowship, Library Company
NEH Summer Seminar Grant