A little about myself

The state and invested publics have made and re-made police power — not only through law but also through institutional storytelling. My work explores what that process has meant for policed people of color negotiating racial capitalism, and who have challenged dominant police narratives to redefine meanings of safety.

The Milwaukee Police Department played a significant role in establishing police legitimacy through carceral memory work. My research examines how the MPD’s storytelling, reinforced by policing experts and criminal-legal system actors, sustained police authority in the 20th century. It analyzes how police narratives informed struggles for Black freedom in the face of state violence and traces movements that challenged the racist criminalization foundational to the carceral state. It is in these ongoing struggles that Milwaukee’s abolitionist horizon took shape.

My in-progress book, The Inquest: Death Investigations and Police Power in Black Milwaukee, amplifies the memory of Black decedents criminalized through medical examiner’s inquests during the high point of Black Power activism in the city. The book historically autopsies death investigations as a tool for exonerating lethal police, suppressing dissent, and legitimizing carceral solutions to crises of racial capitalism.

I completed a PhD in History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2020. While my academic research is rooted in Milwaukee, the lessons I seek to impart extend to the whole of metropolitan America. A commitment to gender and sex equity, racial and economic justice informs my work. I bring this perspective to bear as a public historian who has collaborated to build a range of community archives, oral history collections, and digital humanities projects with diverse institutional partners.

I earned a Public History MA at American University in 2011 and hail from greater Hartford, Connecticut. There, trips to museums like the Mark Twain House and Wadsworth Atheneum as a youth instilled a sense of place and passion for storytelling and artistic visualization.