History teaches us as much about ourselves as the past. As a former history and mathematics teacher at a large inner-city high school, I have seen firsthand the transformative power of historical exploration. Persistent curiosity, a passion for learning, and the opportunities for personal and intellectual growth that historical research and dialogue engenders led me to pursue a doctorate in history at Michigan State University, where I am now a fourth-year graduate student.
My dissertation research is a comparative study of settler colonialism, including settlement policies, interactions between colonizers and the colonized, and Indigenous responses. I examine interactions between Americans and Indians in the Old Northwest Territory in the United States (1778-1830) and those between French colonizers and Algerians (1830-1870) in order to interrogate the ideologies underlying nineteenth-century settler colonialism, explore the options available to colonized Indigenous populations, and situate the early nineteenth-century United States in a broader context of expanding colonial empires.
