Before coming to KSU in 2013, he taught at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 2012, where he trained in American and environmental history, and his research focuses on the intersections of culture and agriculture, poverty and improvement, and land and landscape in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently working on a cultural and environmental history of the Georgia peach, based on his dissertation “Everything is Peaches Down in Georgia”: Culture and Agriculture in the American South, which won prizes from the Society of American Historians, the Agricultural History Society, the Southern Historical Association, and the University of Georgia Graduate School.