I’m a historian of fashion, dress, and the body, working at Indiana University as an Associate Professor of Fashion Design in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design. My research interests include African dress and fashion, contemporary Islamic fashion, working-class histories of dress in the United States, laws and political rhetoric that impact dress and the body, and museum collections. My latest book, On the Job: A History of American Work Uniforms was published by Bloomsbury Academic in February 2024.

In addition to running the DBA, I sit on the editorial advisory board for Bloomsbury Fashion Central and the editorial board for Dress.  I am currently preparing an exhibit for the Indiana University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology titled, “Divine Adornment: Community Stories of Belonging.” I am also developing a library-quality virtual museum on uniforms (uniformhistories.us) and working on some new research about historical entanglements between military uniforms and civilian dress in the United States.

I recently accepted a position as Associate Professor in American Studies with the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo, Norway. As a self-declared "Academic Trekkie", my doctoral and immediate postdoctoral work was primarily rooted in science fiction studies. My first book, Star Trek and the British Age of Sail (McFarland, 2019), maps the largely "hidden" transatlantic double consciousness of Star Trek. I have since co-edited a few larger projects on Star Trek and science fiction in general. My interest in Dress Studies began with the initial idea for my second monograph. After conducting field, archival, and museum work on a Fulbright grant in 2019, my project—"A Cowboy Needs A Hat": A Cultural History of Cowboy Hats—is now under contract with the University of Oklahoma Press.