Research

I am a historian of labor and religion in modern America and the founding director of the Marcus Cunliffe Centre for the Study of the American South at the University of Sussex, www.sussex.ac.uk/cunliffe.

I am currently working on two projects: a history of working-class conservatism in the twentieth century US and a history of religion and black politics in the Jim Crow South.

Publications

Books:

The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America, co-authored with Erik S. Gellman (University of Illinois Press, 2011) ISBN-10: 0252078408

Winner: H. L. Mitchell Award, Southern Historical Association, 2012

Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South (University of Illinois Press, 2010) ISBN-10: 0252035194

Winner: C L R James Award for the best published book for academic or general audiences, Working Class Studies Association, 2011

Winner: Missouri History Book Award, State Historical Society of Missouri, 2011

Between Race and Nation: Black Politics in the Age of Jim Crow, co-authored with Steven Hahn and Patricia Sullivan (Johns Hopkins University Press, in process)

Chapters in Books:

"'The Lazarus of American Farmers': The Politics of Black Agrarianism in the Jim Crow South, 1921-1938," in Beyond Forty Acres and a Mule: African American Landowning Families since Reconstruction, Debra A. Reid and Evan P. Bennett eds. (University Press of Florida, 2012) ISBN-10: 0813039862

"Agrarian Producerism after Populism: Socialism and Garveyism in the Rural South," in Populism in the South Revisited: New Interpretations and New Departures, James M. Beeby ed. (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) ISBN-10: 1617032255

Refereed journal articles:

"'Out Yonder on the Road': Working Class Self-Representation and the 1939 Roadside Demonstration in Southeast Missouri," Southern Spaces (March 16, 2010): link to full text and photographs at www.southernspaces.org/browse/documentary-expression.

"Garveyism and the Eschatology of African Redemption in the Rural South, 1920-1936," Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 20 (January 2010): 27-56.

"Owen Whitfield and the Gospel of the Working-Class in New Deal America, 1936-1946," co-authored with Erik S. Gellman, Journal of Southern History 72 (May 2006): 303-48.

"From Revolution to Reaction: Early Pentecostalism, Radicalism and Race in Southeast Missouri, 1910-1930," Radical History Review 90 (August 2004): 5-29.

"Gideon's Band: From Socialism to Vigilantism in Southeast Missouri, 1907-1916," Labor History 43 (November 2002): 483-503.

Winner: Distinguished Article Award, Forty-Fifth Missouri Conference on History, April 2003

"'I am hoping for a speedy reunion': The Civil War Correspondence of Private Henry Hoberg," The Missouri Historical Review 94 (April 2000): 264-86.

Other Publications:

“Reading Religious Belief as Working-Class Intellectual History” and “Response: Looking Ahead” in “Roundtable on Class and Religion in the early Twentieth-Century South,” Journal of Southern Religion 13 (2011): http://jsr.fsu.edu/Volume13/Front13.html.