I am an assistant professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, where I teach courses from general U.S. history surveys to upper-level seminars on the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement. As a historian of the 20th-century United States, my research focuses on civil rights, criminal justice, and racial activism. My 2021 book, Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945 (Univ. of Georgia Press), shows how journalists, scholars, social workers, and other Black professionals deftly navigated the fraught racial landscape of the urban North to advance social justice.
Based on this research, I created a new website, called Migrant Voices, that serves as a central hub of information on the Great Migration to Pittsburgh. It includes over fifty recently-digitized oral history interviews of African Americans who migrated to Pittsburgh during the interwar period, along with other primary sources.
My current book project examines the intersections of race, policing, and criminal justice reform during the First Great Migration. It is supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
In my field, I have served as book review editor for Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, and as the editor of the Trotter Review, the journal of the William Monroe Trotter Institute at UMass Boston.
Praise for Canaan, Dim and Far
This book is a must for anyone interested in the civil rights movement in the North. [It] should serve as a model for future studies linking the activism of the Great Migration with the activism of the postwar civil rights struggle.
- Stanley Arnold, The Journal of American History
Canaan, Dim and Far presents a timely and important addition to the historical knowledge about this largely forgotten period in a city still rising from the ashes of its industrial past.
- Pamela E. Walck, The Journal of African American History
Representative Publications
Book
Canaan, Dim and Far: Black Reformers and the Pursuit of Citizenship in Pittsburgh, 1915-1945 (University of Georgia Press, 2021)
[Reviewed in Journal of American History, Journal of African American History, and Black Perspectives]
Articles
“The Urban League,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, ed. Jane Dailey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2024).
“‘The Curing of Ills’: African American Women Activists at the Intersections of Race, Class, and Gender during the Great Migration,” Journal of Women’s History 33, no.1 (2021): 37-60.
“The Pursuit of Happiness: Racial Utilitarianism and Black Reform Efforts in John T. Clark’s Urban League,” Journal of Urban History 45, no.1 (2019): 6-22.
“Robert L. Vann and the Pittsburgh Courier in the 1932 Presidential Election: An Analysis of Black Reformism in Interwar America,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 141, no.2 (2019): 141-176.
Chapters in Edited Volumes
“Black Women Reformers in Interwar-Era Pittsburgh,” in The Cambridge History of Black Women in the United States, ed. Karen Cook Bell (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2026) (forthcoming).
“In Search of Knowledge and Opportunity: Josephine Crawford Bellinger and the San Antonio Register,” in Centuries of Voices: Portraits of Black Women in Texas History, ed. Bruce A. Glasrud, Jessica Brannon-Wranosky, Merline Pitre, and Cecilia Gutierrez Venable (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, forthcoming).
Adam Lee Cilli and Pauleena MacDougall, “Between People and Nature”: The Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine,” in Becoming Modern: The University of Maine, 1865-2015, edited by Howard Segal and Anne Acheson (Orono, Maine: University of Maine Press, 2023): 185-203.
