A New Englander by birth and Brooklynite by current circumstance, I’m a graduate student at Princeton University working on a Ph.D. in American History. My dissertation project is an analysis of the politics of American trade with Asia in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War. I also teach a freshman seminar on writing at Princeton. In my research, I’m interested in how commerce, and commercial ideas, influenced the way power was conceived and used in the early United States. I’m especially interested in how the real patterns and imagined possibilities of trade created, packaged, and transmitted information; part of what I’m up to in my dissertation is in figuring out the feedback loop between private trade, political ideology, and official policy. In terms of scholarly fields, I’m most engaged with the literatures on the history of politics, foreign relations, and capitalism.