Ph.D. United States History, University of Virginia, 2019
M.A. United States History, University of Virginia, 2015
M.A. Southern Studies, University of Mississippi, 2013
B.A.  American Studies and Anthropology, Phi Beta Kappa, University of Alabama, 2002

Associate Professor, Department of History, Mississippi State University, 2025-present

Assistant Professor, Department of History, Mississippi State University, 2019-2025

PUBLICATIONS

Book

• Cold War Country: How Nashville’s Music Row and the Pentagon Created the Sound of American Patriotism (The University of North Carolina Press, 2024). 

• * “Best Music Books of 2024,” Rolling Stone.

  * 2024 Finalist, History Book of the Year, Los Angeles Times.

  * 2025 Winner, Belmont University Curb Music Industry Award for Country Music Book of the Year, International Country Music Conference.

Journal Articles
• “Five Strings for Freedom: The Banjo in Cold War America,” Modern American History 7, no. 2 (July 2024): 307-312.

“The 'Good Old Rebel’ at the Heart of the Radical Right,” Southern Cultures 27, no. 4 (winter 2020): 124-139.
• “Nostalgic for Utopia: Anne Romaine’s Folk Music Protest in the New Left South,” Southern Cultures 24, no. 3 (Fall 2018): 45-61.
• “DASH-Amerikan: Keeping Up with the Social Media Ecologies of the Kardashians,” co-authored with the Praxis Digital Humanities cohort, American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (September 2018): 609-611.

Book Chapters
• “The Blues, Country Music, and Agricultural History” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to American Agricultural History, ed. R. Douglas Hurt (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2022).
• “‘Home Is Where the Hatred Is’: Gil Scott-Heron’s Toxic Domestic Spaces and the Rhizomatic South” in Ecocriticism and the Future of Southern Studies, ed. Zackary Vernon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019).
• “Planes, Pencils, and Politics: How Race and Labor Practices Shaped Postwar Atlanta,” in Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power, eds. Matthew Hild and Keri Leigh Merritt (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018). Awarded “Best Book Related to Labor Education 2018-2019” by the United Labor Education Association.

Full CV