I am an Associate Professor of History and Co-founder and Co-director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (CPHDH) at Cleveland State University.
View my Curriculum Vitae.
I specialize in 20th-century U.S. urban and public history. My current book project explores perceptions of decline in post-World War II Cleveland. I have completed (with Nicholas Dagen Bloom) an edited book, American Tourism: Constructing a National Tradition, which is forthcoming in spring 2012 from the Center for American Places at Columbia College Chicago Press. My most recent publication, “Acropolis of the Middle-West: Decay, Renewal, and Boosterism in Cleveland’s University Circle,” appears in the February 2011 issue of the Journal of Planning History. I am the author of New Orleans on Parade: Tourism and the Transformation of the Crescent City, published in 2006 by the Louisiana State University Press and winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize and the Gulf South History Book Award. I have also published in the Journal of American History; Journal of Urban History; Planning Perspectives; Louisiana History; Richard D. Starnes, ed., Southern Journeys: Tourism, History, and Culture in the Modern South (University of Alabama Press); and the Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure in America, ed. Gary S. Cross (Scribner’s).
My public history experience includes a number of collaborative oral history-based projects undertaken with my colleague Mark Tebeau in CPHDH, notably the Euclid Corridor History Project (a virtual linear history museum found at 19 touchscreen transit kiosks along Cleveland’s Euclid Avenue) and Cleveland Historical (an award-winning smartphone app that curates Cleveland for iPhone and Android users). In addition, I led the CPHDH’s Detroit Shoreway Oral History Project and have coordinated nearly 40 public history internships for CSU students at more than a dozen history institutions and organizations in Northeast Ohio since 2004. I am also deeply involved in historic preservation, serving on the Cleveland Heights Landmark Commission and having authored a successful nomination of Grant W. Deming’s Forest Hill Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010 and a walking tour of the district.
I earned my B.A. in History at Furman University (1994), my M.A. in History at the University of Richmond (1996), and my Ph.D. in History at Tulane University (2002). I joined the faculty at Cleveland State University in 2003. I am a native of Gainesville, Georgia.