I research and write broadly about the relationship between law, power, and space while taking the rural seriously as a site of governance, legal implementation, and legal experience. As a legal historian, I am interested in the legal remaking of “the rural” at local, state, and federal levels over the course of the twentieth century. By paying careful attention to rural residents’ on-the-ground experience of law, as well as how race and gender alter those experiences, rural law takes shape in my scholarship not as a undeveloped version of American law writ small, but as a field of law that is an integral part of modern American law, full stop. As part of a broader research agenda, my book project examines multiple fields of law, including local government, education, labor, legal practice, and land use, to mark out the scope of rural legal transformation in the twentieth century. 

You can find article abstracts of published, forthcoming, and in-progress work here. For more information about my dissertation, "Cows, Cars, and Criminals," click here.