About

I am an Associate Professor of History and the Interim Faculty Director for the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University. I received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008 an taught at Indiana University–South Bend for one year before joining the Department of History at Brown in the summer of 2009. My research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world, including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude.

I am the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island’s Founding Father, and co-author of Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America–A Documentary History. My most recent book, a long history of the intertwining of Native American enslavement and dispossession in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and 1980, titled Stealing America: The Hidden History of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, is due out with W.W. Norton/Liveright in April 2026. Additionally, I have authored over a dozen articles and book chapters.

I am also the founder and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas project, which is a tribal community-centered collaborative project that seeks to create a public, centralized database of Native slavery throughout the Americas and across time. My work has been supported by a variety of institutions including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Please see my Academic page for more info and a link to my full c.v.