My work combines extensive archival research with material from oral history interviews to trace how culture, ideology, and identity have changed over the course of an individual’s lifetime. Within this context, I look at the impact of chronic stress, such as poverty, racism, and antisemitism, and acute stress, such as war and disaster. I am committed to making history publicly accessible and meaningful, helping people understand their own histories and each other’s. A strong proponent of interdisciplinary and transnational approaches, I collaborate with scholars and practitioners across disciplines and borders. I have been fortunate to receive support from the Mellon Foundation and the NEH, which has enabled me to deepen the public impact of my work.

I recently concluded my primary oral history project on rank-and-file communist family life during the Cold War, which ran from 2001 to 2025. The project originated with the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which houses the Dutch Communist Party Archive. It was there that I first learned how to prepare, conduct, and make accessible oral history interviews, skills that have remained central to my practice.

Findings from this longitudinal 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 University Press, 2021) and Mama las Marx: Communistische gezinnen in naoorlogs Nederland (Walburg Pers, 2023). Mama las Marx, a nonfiction book, was recognized as one of the best books of 2023 by the Dutch Review of Books. The project also resulted in six peer-reviewed journal articles published in France, the United States, the Netherlands, and Britain, as well as a forthcoming chapter in the Oxford University Press Handbook of Global Socialist Culture.

My current research project on white supremacist families in the Southern United States, funded by the ACLS/Mellon Foundation ($40,000) and the NEH ($60,000), builds on my earlier work on radicalization, this time focusing on the far-right end of the political spectrum. The participants in this project, 13 men and 9 women, were born between 1939 and 1977 and raised in small towns and cities across Virginia, Mississippi, Georgia, Arkansas, Alabama, Louisiana, and North and South Carolina. Their parents were members of or sympathizers with the Ku Klux Klan and/or the White Citizens’ Council and continued their support for the segregationist movement after 1965.

Seen through the eyes of their children, the project explores how parents interpreted the values and ideology of the long segregationist movement and how they transmitted these beliefs to the next generation. Most importantly, it explores participants’ childhood experiences and examines the spaces, such as the military, colleges, churches, and workplaces, where they were first confronted with a different ideological reality from that in which they had grown up.

Based on this research project, I am currently writing a book, Children of the Klan: White Supremacist Families and the Long Segregationist Movement, 1954–1989. This book uses participants’ accounts as a vehicle for telling a broader history of the long segregationist movement. Its chapters explore the radicalization of parents and, in some cases, of the participants themselves, as well as the circumstances that led them to join white supremacist organizations. They examine participants’ experiences in both private and public spheres, highlighting the tensions between the two and the ways in which they navigated integrated spaces, experiences that ultimately shaped their own racial beliefs. The book concludes with a chapter in which participants reflect on their childhoods and consider what values and child-rearing practices, if any, they carried forward from their parents, particularly in raising their own children.

Children of the Klan is intended to assist people in their journeys away from racism while also fostering understanding among those who have not embarked on this journey. Geared toward readers from across the ideological spectrum, the book models the possibilities and necessities of dialogue across ideological lines, an intervention that is desperately needed in this time of intensifying partisan politics and racial violence.

My research paper, “My Father the Klansman: White Supremacist Families in the American South, 1954–1989,” based on this oral history project, was recently accepted by the Journal of Southern History and will be published in August 2026.

Aside from these larger projects, I have conducted several smaller oral history initiatives. In 2013, I traveled to Kearny County in southwest Kansas with a photographer to document the impact of the 2010–2013 drought on local farming communities. Over the course of seven days, I interviewed 20 residents whose lives had been affected by the drought. A richly illustrated chapter based on these oral histories, situating them within the broader historical context of the region, was published in Disasters’ Impact on Livelihood and Cultural Survival: Losses, Opportunities, and Mitigation (CRC Press, 2015). Additionally, I wrote a feature piece titled “Water, as Precious as Gold: Life in Parched Western Kansas,” which was published on the ABC News website. The photographs taken during this trip were brought together in an exhibition, Eighty Years of Dust, which was displayed at the Fort Lee Public Library in New Jersey.

In 2014, I curated an exhibition at the Brooklyn Public Library that explored the social history of Bedford-Stuyvesant through its community murals. At the opening, attended by many long-time residents, two muralists spoke about their work, and I offered remarks about local activism and gentrification. Encouraged by the community’s enthusiasm for its history and eager to learn more, I created an intergenerational oral history workshop as part of the Brooklyn Public Library’s Young Adult Literacy Program (YALP). The three-month workshop combined the practical application of oral history techniques with theoretical analysis. My students were between 18 and 22 years old and grew up in some of the most underserved neighborhoods in Central Brooklyn. They were first interviewed about their own experiences growing up in these neighborhoods and then conducted interviews with older members of their communities to trace continuity and change across key themes: community life and activism, education and employment, family life and values, crime and law enforcement, and popular culture. By the end of the course, we had collected a rich body of material: two focus group interviews, 19 peer interviews, and 28 interviews with long-term residents. I later published a paper based on this project in the journal Children, Youth and Environments.

In 2024, I contributed a chapter to a volume that I co-edited with Matthew Worley, Music, Subcultures, and Migration: Routes and Roots (Routledge, 2024). My chapter draws on more than 20 hours of interviews with Jamaican percussionist Larry McDonald and discusses two intimately intertwined journeys: McDonald’s personal journey from Jamaica to the United States and the transnational movement of Jamaican music. Within this framework, it traces the reception of Jamaican music in the United States, particularly within the African American community, both among audiences and musicians, from the early 1970s onward. Other chapters in this volume, which I conceptualized, similarly combine archival sources and oral testimony from a wide variety of musicians, promoters, critics, and audience members.

I strive to ensure that every oral history project I undertake contributes meaningfully to both scholarly and public discourse. I believe oral history offers great potential not only as a research method but also as a bridge between academic and public audiences. Especially when combined with multimedia elements such as video, photography, and exhibition curation, oral histories come alive in ways that honor participants’ voices and invite broader community engagement.