About me
I am an interdisciplinary historian studying addiction, gender, and the family at the nexus of medicine and law. My research interests also include life insurance medicine and the formation of enduring disparities in modern healthcare systems. I am an Instructor in the Department of History at Colorado State University, where I teach courses on early U.S. and medical history. I hold a Ph.D. in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine from the University of Minnesota and a Master of Arts in History from the University of New Mexico.
My first book project—The Drunkard’s Discipline: A Medico-Legal History of Compulsive Drinking in the Nineteenth-Century United States—frames the quest to define, detect, and discipline the habitual drunkard as a biopolitical enterprise. The habitual drunkard rendered visible an uncomfortable specter of white masculine failure that threatened women, children, and the family when he appeared in civil law contexts such as adult guardianship proceedings, divorce cases, and life insurance litigation. Non-criminal courts practiced judicial patriarchy as they operationalized medical knowledge about intoxication to discipline the habitual drunkard and protect his family. Reconstructing the medico-legal formation of habitual drunkenness reveals a pathologization of compulsion that predates “drugs” and “addiction” as problems altogether.
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