About

I am a Professor of English with the Department of English at Clemson University. I am an authority on North American freedom narratives and the writings of formerly enslaved people. My expertise is particularly focussed on the authorship of such narratives and the ways in which writers represent and imagine their experiences in bondage. Uncovering the hidden identities and stories behind 19th century texts is my specialty. I’m currently working on a biography of John Andrew Jackson, an agitator and abolitionist who escaped from a plantation labor camp in South Carolina and hid with Harriet Beecher Stowe.