My research projects share a common methodology—understanding culture and identity through oral history. My work combines extensive archival research with material from oral history interviews to trace how culture and identity have changed over the course of an individual’s or community’s lifetime. Within this context, I look at the impact of chronic stress, such as poverty and racism, and acute stress such as war and disaster. I am committed to making history useful in the public sphere and helping people create and understand their own histories. Furthermore, I am a huge proponent of interdisciplinary and transnational approaches. I enjoy conducting research across national boundaries and working with scholars from different disciplinary and international backgrounds.

I recently concluded my primary research project, about rank-and-file communist family life during the Cold War, which ran from 2001 to 2019. Findings from this oral history project, for which I conducted a series of interviews with 40 Dutch and British cradle communists, formed the basis of my books, Growing Up Communist in the Netherlands and Britain (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021) and Mama las Marx: Communistische gezinnen in naoorlogs Nederland (Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2023), and six peer-reviewed journal articles published in France, the United States, the Netherlands, and Britain.

As a visiting research fellow at the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam (a position I filled from 2019 until 2021), I conducted additional research into the international communist movement that focused primarily on sexual health, and working-class activists’ involvement in the feminist, anti-racist, and gay rights movement. Because of my research expertise, I was invited to join the editorial board of the British peer-reviewed journal Twentieth Century Communism – a Journal of International History (London: Lawrence & Wishart). Since joining the board in 2019, I’ve edited a special issue titled “Sexuality, Respectability and Communism” which came out in the fall of 2021, and a transnational issue titled “Imagining the 20th Century Resistance Fighter: Intersectional Perspectives on Global Anti-fascist Movements and Commemorations”.

My most recent research project “Children of the Klan, Growing Up in the Southern Far Right 1950-1990”, which was generously funded by the ACLS/Mellon Foundation ($40,000) and an NEH Public Scholars grant ($60,000), is a continuation of my research into working-class radicalization, this time on the far-right end of the political spectrum. Based on interviews with 22 individuals whose parents were members of or sympathizers with the Ku Klux Klan and/or the Citizens’ Council in the period 1954-1989, autobiographies, archival materials, and existing Ku Klux Klan historiography, this project is concerned with the ways in which the segregationist movement’s values and ideologies were both transmitted to but also interrupted and disrupted by the children of white supremacists. Interview questions focused on cultural and political upbringing, religious convictions, friendships and relationships, gender roles, sex and sexuality, education and aspirations, and work and career choices.

Social histories of movements on the far right are notably scarce. In universities, the post-WWII KKK and the Citizens’ Council are usually only discussed in the context of the civil rights movement and described from the perspective of the oppressed. However, to truly understand how and why people radicalize, we must analyze the lives and experiences of the ordinary men and women who joined these groups. How did they identify themselves, how were they identified by others, and what was it about their lives that coincided with the agenda of far-right politics? These questions are not only central to my oral history project, but also form the basis of an introductory course I’ve developed titled The History of the U.S. Far Right which I teach at Stockton University.

As part of the “Children of the Klan” project, I created an event series that focused on the intergenerational transmission of racial beliefs. This series consisted of an interactive panel with historian Kristina Durocher, author of Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in the Jim Crow South; Jvonne Hubbard, child of the late Grand Dragon of the North Carolina KKK; and myself that was hosted by Kingsborough’s Student Union and Intercultural Center in 2022 and an exhibit titled “Within and Beyond Exclusionary Communities: White Supremacism and Racism in the United States” which was on show at Stockton University in New Jersey from September 2023 until January 2024.

In March 2024, I published an edited volume together with Matthew Worley of Reading University, titled Music, Subcultures, and Migration: Routes and Roots. This volume concentrates on the period from the 1940s to the present, exploring how popular music forms such as blues, disco, reggae, hip hop, grime, metal and punk evolved and transformed as they traversed time and space. Within this framework, the collection traces how music and subcultures travel through, to and from democracies, autocracies and anocracies. My own chapter is based on 30+ hours of interviews with legendary Jamaican percussionist Larry McDonald and describes his personal journey from Jamaica to the United States and his experiences in the music industry in both countries. Within this framework, it examines the reception of Jamaican music in the United States particularly in the African American community − both in terms of audience and among musicians from the early 1970s onwards. By examining McDonald’s experiences with different bands, including Taj Mahal and Gil Scott-Heron, and collaborating with a variety of artists − Jamaican and non-Jamaican, black and white – as well as looking at the way Jamaican music adapted to new contexts without losing its roots, this chapter unearths the dynamic nature of the music, the musicians and their audience.