Historian. Novelist. Greedy Woman.

Coming out in November 2024, Lustful Appetites traces the imagined connection between good food and wicked sex in the United States and Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present day.

Unspeakable uses the life of the notorious author Norman Douglas to historicize how attitudes to pederasty, or sexual encounters between adults and youth, have changed over time.

* 2021 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize, Canadian Historical Association

Charity and Sylvia is the intimate history of two ordinary women who lived in an extraordinary same-sex marriage during the early nineteenth century.

* 2015 James C. Bradford Biography Prize, Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

* 2015 Stonewall Honor, American Library Association

* 2015 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize finalist, Canadian Historical Association

* 2015 LGBT Studies, Lambda Literary Award finalist

* 2015 New England Society prize finalist

* Journal Sentinel top 10 book for 2014

* Reader’s Lane top 10 non-fiction book for 2014

* Boston Globe Top 10 Ideas column for 2014

* Book of the week at salon.com

* Featured in The Washington Post and The Guardian

The Reign of Terror in America explores how the United States reacted to the violence of the French Revolution. Fears of Jacobin violence drove new social conservatives to embrace new humanitarian movements including antislavery, antiwar, and support for public education.

* 2010 Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies and the Institut français de Washington