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Research and writing of a book on how different peoples and cultures have envisioned Jesus through history from the earliest sources to the present. 

The primary question I raise is: How, from the first century to the present, have countless people envisioned Jesus in such varied and contradictory ways? I address this question as follows: First, what is the evidence from the earliest sources? Second, what is different about how we evaluate it now? Third, who was Jesus of Nazareth in his own time? Finally, what do the countless versions of Jesus tell us about the people and cultures who produced them in literature, art, music, and films, up to the present? While all scholars start from New Testament texts, here I investigate a far wider range of sources, including many nearly always left out of such discussions: Gospels later denounced as “heresy;” and anti-Christian writings by critics of the early movement. Like The Gnostic Gospels and others I have written, this book is addressed not only to scholars and students, but also to a much wider audience, offering a historical view of how Christianity began, and how it resonates today.

Research and writing a book on the cultural history and representations of the Russian forest in literature and art from medieval times to the present.

“Green Russia: A Forest History” draws on literature, art, music, and original reportage to explore the cultural significance of the Russian forest from medieval times to the present, from pre-Christian forest spirits to the canonical figures of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev to modern tree-worshipping eco cults, showing the philosophical, creative, political, and economic power of Russia’s vast wilderness.

Research and writing of a biography of the musician-educator Ella Jenkins (b. 1924).

"This Is Rhythm" will be the first biography of the musician-educator Ella Jenkins (b. 1924), a pioneer of “multicultural” children’s music. Beginning with her 1957 Folkways debut "Call-and-Response Rhythmic Group Singing," Jenkins, a self-taught artist, reimagined American children’s music by grounding it in the sonic traditions of the African American diaspora. Before Jenkins, music for young audiences was geared either toward diversion or cultural uplift, with European art music as a pinnacle. In contrast, by taking Black music—from the playground chants of Black girls to the gospel music of Black churches—as a paradigm, Jenkins envisioned music-making as a practice of community and cooperation. "This Is Rhythm" traces Jenkins’ life from her South Side childhood to her receipt of a lifetime Grammy Award (2004), positioning her not only as a recording artist and performer, but as a grassroots African American female educator who advanced civil rights through rhythm and song.

Research and writing of a book on a lawsuit filed in the 1980s against the CIA over its MK-Ultra program, which involved experiments in mind control on unwitting human subjects.

My book will tell the story of two attorneys and their daunting attempt to hold the CIA accountable for its programs of human experimentation. Throughout the 1980s, famed civil rights attorney Joseph Rauh and his young law partner James Turner represented the victims of these programs in a lawsuit against the CIA. Rauh and Turner eventually secured a lucrative settlement for the victims, but not before the CIA frustrated them at every turn. Most importantly, their efforts laid the groundwork for understanding the failures of the CIA’s system of oversight and how to avoid them in the future.

Research and writing of a political biography of A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), an African American labor leader and civil rights activist.

"The Unfinished Revolution: The Political Life of A. Philip Randolph" is a biography of one of the 20th century’s most important civil rights and labor activists whose years of political engagement spanned the 1910s to the early 1970s. It explores currents of Black radicalism, trade unionism racism, anticommunism, and anti-colonialism during the Cold War. Critically exploring Randolph's multiple campaigns against governmental and union discrimination, it situates Randolph’s political beliefs and activism in relation to broader African American political currents and explores his use of public opinion, political pressure, the judiciary, and grassroots mobilization in pursuit of racial and economic equality.

Writing a book on the policing of twentieth century civil rights activism, activist efforts to effect police reform, and strategic responses by some urban policing agencies. 

Writing for a broad public audience, I seek to answer three interrelated questions. First, how did police across the United States treat and mistreat the civil rights movement, investigating and retaliating against activists through a variety of means? Second, how did civil rights activists use pickets, rallies, and marches to demand equal treatment from police? Third, how did police discredit such protests as dangerous acts of extremism, forestalling the emergence of a national movement for equitable policing until the 2010s and exacerbating the larger crisis of racial inequality in our criminal justice system for decades?

Writing and revision of a book on the legal history of the color line in Mississippi.

This book will offer a new history of the color line in Mississippi told through the stories of interracial families. It centers the remarkable case of the Burnsides, who crossed the color line and “passed” as white while remaining in their tight-knit community. The book will explore how interracial families experienced the rise of Jim Crow and how they responded. Although segregationist politicians claimed to support the strict separation of the races, the continued existence of mixed-race families in Mississippi into the twentieth century reveals the contradictions and complexity of how segregation law was understood and enforced at the local level. Ultimately, white supremacists sought to erase the existence of such familial ties across the color line to perpetuate the myth of segregationists’ historic commitment to “racial purity.”

Research and writing of a biography of the American writer Muriel Rukeyser
(1913-1980).

This is the first biography of the American writer Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), whose genre-bending work (poetry, plays, films, novels and biographies), involvement in wide-ranging artistic and political circles from New York to Hollywood, and accounts of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, racial injustice, environmental disaster, and single motherhood, defied and remade women's positions in 20th-C America. Described by Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich as “mother of us all,” Rukeyser changed how we see the role of the woman writer, the activist writer, the queer writer, the Jewish writer, and the mother writer, and yet she has not been recognized for these revolutionary reinventions, but silenced by Cold War gender, political and publishing norms. This biography makes visible Rukeyser’s central place in American literature, as a catalyst and creator, demonstrating the value of her work for understanding the political crises—and possibilities—of our own times.

Research and writing of a book about Benjamin Franklin’s attitudes towards money and finance.

Research and writing of a book about money and finance in the life of Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin’s Money is the first financial life of the most famous colonial American. It follows Benjamin Franklin’s rise from indentured servant to eighteenth-century media mogul and it explains how Franklin managed to escape money’s darker connotations. Franklin’s rise, the book contends, was enabled not only by his careful management of his own and others’ money, but also by his careful management of his reputation as a maker of money. It is not coincidental, my book contends, that the early American most associated with money was also early America’s greatest humanitarian.

Research and writing of a history of the sexual revolution told through the life of Candice Vadala (1950-2015), American adult film performer, director, and producer.

Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution is both an uncomfortably intimate biography and an epic history of the late twentieth century United States, tracing the political economy of the postwar period and the attendant restructuring of families, gender roles, and sexuality; the rise of Big Freud and the dawn of Big Porn; and the relationships of law and culture, high and low, self and society in a period of sweeping transformation.

Research and writing a cultural history of the Hospital of the Innocents in Florence, Italy, an exceptional institution of childcare and a notable example of early Italian Renaissance architecture, from 1419 to the present.

“Brunelleschi’s Children: How a Renaissance Orphanage Saved 400,000 Lives and Reinvented Childhood” will be the first book for a broad audience to chart and analyze comprehensively the history of the Hospital of the Innocents (or Innocenti) in Florence, Italy, from 1419 to the present day. A foundling home designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, it revolutionized our understanding of childhood development, with contributions such as giving art instruction to unwanted foundlings for the first time, securing dowries and gainful employment for historically ill-treated female children, and paving the way for the birth of pediatrics as a medical science. “Brunelleschi’s Children” will bring together the Innocenti’s multivariate strands into one unified narrative, showing how its devotion to what the historian Jacob Burckhardt called Renaissance “many-sidedness” enabled it to impact so many areas of human life and solve a great challenge in early modern Europe: the crisis of abandoned children.

Research and writing of a biography of American author Madeline L’Engle (1918 – 2007).

The first adult biography of Madeleine L’Engle (1918 – 2007), author of the Newbery Award-winning classic A Wrinkle in Time (and 60 other books), to be published by FSG, draws on hundreds of hours of interviews and exclusive access to private journals, unpublished manuscripts, and personal and editorial correspondence. One of America’s most influential and beloved writers, L’Engle stood on the shoulders of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Lucy Maud Montgomery, published alongside contemporaries including Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, and Katherine Paterson, and transformed the landscape of possibility for women writers and female protagonists by making way for Ursula Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, J.K. Rowling, and others. This narrative literary biography tells the story of her life, work, and influence in the context of 20th century women authors of dystopic fiction and literature for young people.

A book chronicling an experiment conducted in the 1960s by the Stouffer Foundation, a North Carolina-based philanthropy, to desegregate all-white southern boarding schools.

In the late 1960s, a group of white, southern philanthropists conducted a social experiment that they hoped would change the character of the South. They recruited and paid for 140 talented black and brown students to desegregate all-white, southern boarding schools, then havens for white families fleeing court-ordered integration. The question at the heart of the effort was novel: Could the program make white children less bigoted by exposing them to black students? For nearly 10 years, the North Carolina-based philanthropy, called the Stouffer Foundation, desegregated 20 schools and attempted to study what happened. My project is a narrative history of this experiment, tracing the arc of the participating students’ lives and examining the era’s promise of desegregating America’s schools and professions. I hope my work will have reverberations in the ways we historicize the civil rights era, and contribute to wider discussions around social integration and race in American democracy.

Research and writing of a book on the history of the Espionage Act (1917-present).

This book will provide the first history of the Espionage Act over the course of its life, using the century-long evolution of this controversial law to explore the challenges that state secrecy poses to democratic life. Based on new research, it argues that the institutional and legal apparatus for securing national security secrets emerged in a piecemeal, improvised fashion over the course of many decades. In a narrative that unfolds through infamous espionage trials, paranoia about foreign infiltration, scandalous abuses by the national security state, and controversial leaks and whistleblowers, the book shows that history has bequeathed to us a broken secrecy regime, one that classifies too much information, with serious consequences for democratic accountability, public discourse, and the freedom of the press.

Writing a narrative history of the 1968 Miss America pageant, a turning point in the women's movement. 

No More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation is a character-driven work of narrative history examining beauty, feminism, race, women’s rights, and politics in the twentieth-century U.S. through the events of the 1968 Miss America Pageant. Famously protested by women’s liberation activists, Miss America was also challenged that year by the first-ever Miss Black America Pageant, held on the same day and just a few blocks away in Atlantic City. No More Miss America! spotlights people and events often relegated to the margins of political history and popular accounts of the period and demonstrates the transformative effect of putting diverse women’s voices at the center of inquiry. It is under contract with Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

Research and writing of a book on the 1916 nomination of Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) to the United States Supreme Court.

My subject is the nomination (by President Woodrow Wilson) and confirmation in 1916 – after a four month long battle against some of the most powerful forces in American politics, business and law – of Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941), the celebrated “People’s Attorney” and first Jewish Justice, to the Supreme Court. This is not only a dramatic story worth telling in its own right but, with hindsight, we can see that it was the first “modern’ Supreme Court confirmation battle, featuring protracted Senate hearings, a concerted attack on Brandeis’s character and ethics, and a heated public debate about the nominee’s political beliefs and fitness for a Court seat, with much of the opposition, Brandeis believed, due to antisemitism. Nominations to the Supreme Court have recently been, and will surely remain, a source of partisan controversy. My book can provide timely perspective on recent and future confirmation battles, as well as on the changing role of the Court over the past century.

Writing a book examining Jewish identity as constructed in Yiddish-language children’s literature. 

“Umbrella Sky: Children’s Literature and Modern Jewish Worldmaking” takes the aesthetically rich and historically indispensable corpus of nearly a thousand extant Yiddish children's books as a novel vantage point from which to observe key movements—political and geospatial—of Eastern European Jewry during the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth century. I extend theoretical reframings of childhood into the Yiddish-speaking sphere, foregrounding the role of children’s literature in the intertwined cultural renaissance and quest for social justice that animated secularist, interwar Jewish life. This project integrates a range of concerns, including a changing understanding of gender norms, child psychology, class consciousness and struggle, and the pursuit of racial justice. Focusing on broadly resonant motifs, themes, and nodes, this accessible book probes how writers and cultural leaders negotiated the tensions between traditional and emerging forms of Jewish identity.

Research and writing of a history of the heirs of George and Martha Washington between the American Revolution and the Civil War.

George Washington was more than the nation’s father; he was a surrogate father for Martha’s four grandchildren via her first marriage. The Custis grandchildren led remarkable lives that paralleled America’s story in its first century: military triumph and tragedy; democracy and old aristocratic ties; visions of liberty alongside the horrors of slavery. With lives stretching from the American Revolution to the eve of the Civil War, the Custises were celebrated figures that used George Washington’s legacy to weigh in on the nation’s political struggles. They deployed their ties to Washington as a source of power, both socially and politically. The Custises also put in conscious efforts to shape themselves as George Washington’s heirs, despite their lack of blood ties to him, revealing the ways family was constructed rather than natural. Their remarkable story offers new perspectives on the meaning of family and its role in American political life.

Research and writing of a book on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania since its founding in 1741 to the present.

My book explores the enduring contradiction between egalitarianism and domination in American life through a poetic, accessible and carefully researched exploration of one city: Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The book traces the 280-year arc of the city’s history, revisiting iconic episodes and motifs in U.S. history and in the American popular imagination: the spiritual city on a hill built into the wilderness; the immigrant industrial metropolis, engine of American global power; the postindustrial crisis and its possible redemption by the glamor of casino capitalism. I demonstrate that aspirations for equality have been more vibrant, more varied in their origins, and more successfully implemented than most readers may imagine. At the same time, I trace the evolving structures of racial and gender hierarchy and economic exploitation that have constrained those aspirations. This book seeks to reinvigorate discussion about what equality has meant – and might yet mean – in the United States.

Research and writing of a book on the social, cultural, and political meanings of ancestry in human history.

My project offers the first account of the social, cultural, and political meanings of ancestry in human history. Since antiquity, lineage has shaped power relations, material inheritance, legal rights, and that amorphous but meaningful thing we call “identity.” Ancestry itself, I argue, has an ancestry. Different ways of recording where we come from are layered onto one another. Genealogies capture the priorities of various kinship systems; laws codify privileges and exclusions based on lineage; and today’s sleek DNA kits deliver a record of ancestry anchored in biology, even as their results are interpreted in ways that rest on deep, if not always acknowledged, assumptions about status, race, ethnicity, and nationhood. Ranging from pre-history to the present, my book will describe how ancestry has operated in specific historical contexts, with the goal of explaining why, for whom, and in what ways lineage has been invested with power.

Research and writing of a book about blues performer Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949), his interactions with music collectors John A. and Alan Lomax, and the racial and labor politics of the post-Reconstruction era.

A book intended for both trade and academic audiences, “Bring Judgment Day” challenges the accepted mythology surrounding legendary blues performer Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly (1889 -1949), much of it focused on his violent nature and criminal record. This narrative was shaped in the 1930s by white music collector John A. Lomax and his young son, Alan, and, as my research shows, masks a much deeper story. For the first time, "Bring Judgment Day" explores the Ledbetter legend in the context of post-Reconstruction southern racial and labor politics and a corrupt system of criminal justice and explores the ways in which the Lomaxes, aided by the northern press and emerging forms of mass media, built on prevailing stereotypes to market the performer in a way that falsified his past while obscuring the nation's own culpability.

Research and writing of a book about artistic collaboration between writers, dancers, artists, and art collectors in Chicago from the 1930s through the 1950s, including Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), and Carlos Mérida (1891-1985).

"Eye to Eye" tells stories of artistic collaboration between writers Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein; dancer Ruth Page and sculptor Isamu Noguchi; curator Katharine Kuh and artist Carlos Mérida; and dancer Katherine Dunham and art collector Bernard Berenson. The idea behind the book is that the creation of new, often hybrid artistic forms requires a risk that is not just aesthetic but often very personal. By illuminating conversations, disagreements, impasses, and revisions, my aim is to tell the story of artistic process, the historical as well as intimate contingencies that shape the production of art, the physical and intellectual "work behind the work." The book focuses on the early 1930s through the 1950s, before the transformations of the women’s movement or the major social changes of the 1960s. During the economic strains of the Great Depression, the repressions of McCarthyism, and the violence of Jim Crow, what kinds of relationships could be equalitarian, reciprocal, equal?

Research and writing of a book on the Matto Grosso anthropological expedition to Brazil (1930-1931).

"The Last Great Trip" engagingly tells the previously unknown story of the 1930-31 Matto Grosso Expedition up the Paraguay River in Brazil. Following in the footsteps of Roosevelt, Fawcett, and other "explorers" of the region, a group of wealthy businessmen, odd-ball expatriates (including a Cossack captain and a Latvian jaguar hunter), inexperienced filmmakers, and bumbling academics attempt to film a "first contact" movie with the Bororo. Virtually everything goes wrong -- from the research canoe capsizing with a year's worth of specimens, to Portuguese-speaking "natives," to jaguars refusing to be caught, to a shipload of jungle animals that no zoo in America could afford during the Depression. Yet despite characters straight of a jungle pulp novel, the group manages to create the first ever film using sound synced in the field, and the story is ultimately a profound meditation on developing -- and conflicting -- ideas about otherness, indigeneity, colonialism, and modernity.

Research and writing of a biography of neurologist and author Oliver Sacks (1933-2015).

I am writing the first biography of Oliver Sacks (1933-2015), “the poet laureate of contemporary medicine,” whose bestselling works showed that the humanities—especially literature and philosophy—play a crucial role in medicine. His view that there is healing value in understanding and giving voice to a patient’s illness narrative revitalized the “case study” tradition and transformed medical practice. He revealed how philosophical explorations into the nature of consciousness inform neuroscience. And by highlighting his patients’ creativity, unique talents, and incredible valor in the face of their many challenges, Sacks sparked a cultural revolution, the “neurodiversity movement.” Sacks spent most of his career communicating literary methods, philosophical ideas, and medical research to a broad audience. Drawing on exclusive access to his vast personal archive, my biography of Sacks (under contract with Knopf) will be a work of public scholarship about the making of a public scholar.

A history of incarceration in Auburn, New York through the story of William Freeman, convicted of a quadruple murder in 1846.

My book is a narrative history, based in archival research and intended for general readers, of a quadruple murder that occurred in 1846 in New York State. I use this event to revise the stories we tell about the origins of prison for profit—and subsequently the roots of anti-Black racism. Well-known scholars argue that the American prison industry developed as a Southern effort to re-install slavery after the Civil War. In contrast, I show how the antebellum North originated for-profit convict labor (a fact that previous scholars acknowledge but have not communicated effectively to the public). This fact matters because the Northern mode of convict labor led to distinctive forms of racism: ones based in liberal reform, modern manufacturing, and even abolitionism. By narrating the life of one Black man, his family, and his city, my book restores the antebellum North to the stories we tell about profit-driven incarceration and racism—thus changing what we know about each.