I am a medievalist and a cartographic historian, as well as a historian of roads and pathways and pilgrimage. But I am best well known for my work on the role of eels in pre-modern England from the tenth through the seventeenth centuries. I am heavily engaged in outreach and public engagement to make the eel history more widely known, and to raise awareness for the role of eels as an endangered species. My work with eels and eel history has been profiled in TIME, The Guardian, Atlas Obscura, Hakai Magazine, and The New Yorker (click here for a full list of earned media)
I have kept up the public outreach part of my work, though, and I continue to write and talk about eels and eel history. I am (mostly) no longer an academic, however. The collapse of the academic job market and the advent of COVID just as I completed my PhD saw to that. That saddens me; I believe we are at a point in time when we are badly in need of trained and thoughtful historians.
While not in the academy, though, I have taken many of my academic interests and channelled them into a business drawing custom maps on commission: Surprised Eel Mapping. I work primarily with academic historians to provide them with clean, clear maps for their monographs, book chapters, and articles. But I also draw maps for games and decoration, as well. There is more information at the website linked above, including examples of my work and information about pricing and process. I have a brochure here.
Education
PhD, Medieval Studies, Cornell University (2020)
MA, Medieval Studies, Cornell University (2017)
MA, History, East Tennessee State University (2013)
MPA, Nonprofit Management, Park University (2011)
BA, History and Classical Studies, Hamilton College (2000)
Personal History
Academia offered a second career for me, and my work history is varied. Prior to returning to school, I spent a decade coaching collegiate volleyball in Tennessee, Texas, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. I had good success as a coach; I enjoyed the competition, and how it let me work with student-athletes to help them grow as people, students, and volleyball players. I eventually burned out on the travel and the recruiting, though. When I found that I was enjoying the time in study halls more than the time on the court, I knew that it was time for a change.
Beyond coaching, I have been a guide for whitewater rafting and caving expeditions in eastern Tennessee while I was in graduate school at ETSU. Between coaching and grad school, I worked for a year researching issues of corporate sustainability and global risk for the Conflict Securities Advisory Group. Immediately after college I spent a year working for the Pete Seeger-founded quarterly publication, Sing Out! Magazine. My life has taken me in a lot of different directions, and I expect that it will continue to do so!
Despite this variety, however, certain themes have remained true throughout my working life. I have gravitated towards work in service of others, I have always sought to teach people, and I have found value in stories and histories. My past points towards my present, and gives me a wide scope of experiences to draw upon.
