About

I am a historian whose work has principally examined the lives of women in early America, bringing biographical approaches and material culture methods to women’s social and cultural history.

My first book, The Needle’s Eye: Women and Work in the Age of Revolution, examined gender and artisanry in early New England. In 2009 I published an edited collection, Cultivating a Past: Essays in the History of Hadley, Massachusetts, followed in 2010 by Betsy Ross and the Making of America — a scholarly biography of that much-misunderstood early American craftswoman. A short biography of Massachusetts gownmaker Rebecca Dickinson appeared in summer 2013. In 2016, Max Page and I brought out the edited collection Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation. In 2019 I completed a microhistory of women and work in 18th-century New England titled Entangled Lives: Labor, Livelihood, and Landscapes of Change in Rural Massachusetts. In 2025, my research and writing received the St. Botolph Club Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award — the first author to be recognized by that body for literary achievement in nonfiction.

My new research and writing heads in new directions, though, like much of my previous work, the project brings a biographical lens to the study of women’s lives in the past. Comradeship of Beauty contemplates women creatives in 1930s New England through the lived experiences of poet and performer Normena MacKinnon and her partner, poet and artist Gertrude Tiemer.