Research & Writing

Ongoing Research & Inquiry

My current research centers on the intersections of early American print culture, archival absence, and the afterlives of economic power. I am particularly interested in how histories of slavery, commerce, and governance in the Northern United States were documented — and how much was rendered indirect, obscured, or normalized through language.

I approach research as both historical investigation and interpretive practice, asking not only what archives contain, but how their structures shape understanding, memory, and embodied experience in the present.


Slavery North Initiative (2025–)

As a Research Assistant with the Slavery North Initiative, I work with early New Hampshire newspapers from the late eighteenth century, focusing on digitized and microfilm collections held by the Library of Congress and regional repositories.

My work includes:

  • Close reading of fugitive advertisements and commercial notices

  • Tracking naming practices, racial descriptors, and legal language

  • Identifying publication gaps and archival silences

  • Cross-referencing missing issues across institutional collections

This research contributes to a broader effort to uncover Northern participation in slavery and to complicate the idea that enslavement was solely a Southern institution.

The Wentworth Project: Commerce, Influence, and Indirect Power

Within this work, I have been tracing the repeated appearance of the Wentworth family — particularly Joshua Wentworth across newspaper advertisements related to shipping, auctions, cargo, and trade in the 1770s.

Rather than focusing on direct ownership of enslaved people, this inquiry examines indirect participation:

how merchant families accumulated wealth and political influence through port infrastructure, trade networks, and the circulation of goods produced by enslaved labor.

This project asks:

  • How does indirect economic participation shape responsibility and memory?

  • What does it mean to benefit from slavery without appearing explicitly in its most violent records?

  • How do such systems continue to echo in modern forms of capital, health, and bodily regulation?

The Wentworth family functions here not as an anomaly, but as a case study in how Northern economic power operated through distance, deniability, and normalization.

Archival Gaps & Methodological Questions

A central component of my research involves identifying and documenting missing or incomplete newspaper runs, title changes, and publication interruptions across multiple repositories.

Rather than treating these gaps as failures, I treat them as historical evidence, moments that raise questions about preservation, access, and whose lives were deemed worthy of record.

This work has involved correspondence with state libraries, academic institutions, and special collections to assess what exists, what is inaccessible, and what may have been lost.


Toward Speculative & Embodied Futures

In Progress

This research is ongoing. What appears here reflects process, not conclusion.


Alongside archival research, I am developing an interpretive framework that bridges historical inquiry with questions of embodiment, care, and collective healing.

This evolving line of inquiry considers:

  • How histories of commerce and enslavement shaped bodily experience

  • How trauma and regulation persist beyond documentation

  • How speculative, somatic, and visual methods might offer alternative ways of engaging historical knowledge

This work remains exploratory and interdisciplinary, drawing from history, cultural theory, and emerging conversations around public health, somatics, and design.

  • Continued archival analysis of New Hampshire newspapers (1770s–1780s)

  • Expansion of the Wentworth project into a longer-form research study

  • Development of public-facing research outputs (writing, visual work, and potential exhibitions)

My research is guided by the belief that archives are not neutral containers, but living systems shaped by power, omission, and care. I approach historical inquiry as both analysis and interpretation, attentive to what survives, what disappears, and how knowledge is felt as well as recorded.