Research

Work and democracy in the Progressive Era United States

I am interested in how intellectuals expressed ideas about work and democracy in what some historians call the Progressive Era. I am especially interested in how these ideas shaped some of the political reform movements that took root in the same period, and in how we should understand the people who constituted the ideology of reform that we call “Progressivism.”

I wrote a series of articles on some of the ideology’s major exponents and (finally) expanded it into a book, A Working Democracy: Progressivism and the Politics of Work, adding two more chapters, on W.E.B. Du Bois and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and an interpretive introduction and conclusion that assess the Progressive movement as a whole.

• A Working Democracy: Progressivism and the Politics of Work. University of Notre Dame Press, under contract.
• “John Dewey’s Theory of Vocation.” American Political Thought 5, no. 2 (2016): 303–325. DOI
• “A Working Democracy: Jane Addams on the Meaning of Work.” The Review of Politics 75, no. 3 (2013): 357–382. DOI
• “Herbert Croly on Work and Democracy.” Polity 44, no. 1 (2012): 81–105. DOI

Other peer-reviewed articles

• “David Foster Wallace and the Audience of Democratic Authority.” American Political Thought 11, no. 1 (2022): 96–115. DOI