Teaching
Teaching
U.S. History to 1877
U.S. History Since 1877
Civil War and Reconstruction
Intro to Public History
U.S. Military History
Social Advocacy and Ethical Life
I taught this class in fulfillment of my Bridge Humanities Fellowship, which included foundational training in ethical theory and its relevance to socio-political expression and training in the principles and performance of ethical oral communication, with emphasis on argumentation and audience engagement.
United States History Introductory Survey. Online, synchronous due to COVID-19.
U.S. History to 1865
U.S. History to 1865, online, asynchronous.
I have also been examining Civil War women nurses and the trauma they experienced in field and military hospitals. In reading numerous diaries and letters, I find that women slowly “benumb” their senses in order to productively serve their respective countries. In addition to numbing themselves to the smell, sight, sound, and touch of death, they additionally harden themselves emotionally and note with some frequency that they are no longer moved by death and gore. This research combines two exciting fields–sensory and emotions history–and further complicates our idea of homefront versus battlefield. I argue that women nurses were particularly unprepared for the horrors of war due to ideas of female propriety, but experienced traumatic events much like their male counterparts. They should not be omitted from current studies of war and trauma.
I speak more about this topic for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine and in this podcast.
I served as the researcher on the Presidential Commission on University History, which was charged to "study and better understand the complex history of the University of South Carolina, including the contributions of marginalized and underrepresented people and/or groups whose voices have not typically been heard. As the researcher, I compiled a list of all named buildings on campus and their origins; detailed write-ups of select building names with complex histories; a lengthy list of potential new names for campus buildings; a suggested template for a university history website; and brief biographies of notable figures overlooked in UofSC's history. The full report can be found here. I then currently consulted for the Implementation Group in response to the report.
Though the university president has decided not to move forward with our suggestions for renaming, I will continue to find ways to tell the hard history of the University of South Carolina through digital and public history.