photo of reading room with bookshelves, table, and chairs in Seymour Library at Knox College

RESEARCH

Current Projects

My research examines the politics of Western territorial expansion and Native American sovereignty during the Civil War and Reconstruction. I am especially interested in questions about spatial power and authority, political participation, sovereignty, citizenship, and state building in a postwar context.

I am currently adapting my dissertation for a book manuscript that analyzes Reconstruction from the vantage point of the Northwestern Great Plains. Using Montana Territory as a case study, I examine how relations between and among Native American nations, settlers, and local and federal governments defined Reconstruction at both local and federal levels. I principally argue that Reconstruction was a national process that experimented with federal and local forms of authority, settler colonialism, and state formation.

Using cartography, personal and mass communication, artwork, literature, and government records, I portray a version of Reconstruction that was fluid, chaotic, and often violent as western civil institutions either broke down or competed for primacy. Moreover, by integrating the historiographies of Reconstruction, Western history, Native American ethnohistory, and Critical Indigenous Theory, this study challenges the notion that federal state formation in the West (and state restoration in the South) were linear processes ushered by a collective of federal actors.

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