“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.”

James Baldwin, The White Man's Guilt (1965)

Teaching, Research, and Inquiry

As a history instructor at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, High School Academic Program, I write from within the conditions my scholarship examines. Drawing on poststructural theory and Foucauldian genealogy, I study pastoral and disciplinary power, the moral discourses that shape educational assessment and teacher labor, and how secular educational institutions inherit and reconfigure religious moral structures.

Teaching Philosophy

For me, teaching is a vocation grounded in care. I center equity, student voice, universal design, and open communication, working to create classrooms that support rigorous inquiry and meaningful human connection through peer collaboration and discussion.

Assessment is never neutral. It is one of the principal sites where schools enact normative judgment, sort students, and reproduce the moral grammars my scholarship traces. I design my courses with that critique in view. Drawing on the science of learning (NASEM, 2018), Universal Design for Instruction (Scott, McGuire, & Shaw, 2003), and Universal Design for Learning (CAST, 2018), I work to make the criteria of evaluation visible to students, distribute multiple pathways for engagement and demonstration, and refuse the fiction that a single performance can stand in for a student's intellectual life. Practice and scholarship sit in conversation: my research examines how moral discourses are inscribed in assessment; my classroom work asks what it would mean to assess otherwise.

Recent Scholarship and Publications

Recent work includes my dissertation, Liturgy: A Foucauldian Genealogy on the Discourse of Moral Ideologies Within Educational Assessment (2025); a chapter in Foucault and Education: Exploring Perspectives and Practices; a foreword to Human Teaching by Chris Osmond; a recently proposed article for The International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education; and a chapter accepted for The Routledge International Handbook of Post Qualitative and New Approaches to Inquiry.

Awards, Recognitions, and Honors

• Excellence in Teaching Award, University of North Carolina School of the Arts (2022). Announcement

• Nominee, UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching (2022). Nominated by UNCSA following receipt of the institutional Excellence in Teaching Award.

• Chancellor's Recognition, UNCSA Faculty Council (2013). At a Faculty Council meeting, then-Chancellor Dr. James Moeser described my 9th-grade world history course as "one of the best classes I have ever attended."

• Spartan Excellence Award, Mount Tabor High School (2012).