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I am a historian of criminal justice in the Jim Crow South and director of the Southern Oral History Program. My book, Lethal State (UNC Press, 2019) is a history of the death penalty in North Carolina between the end of the Civil War and the 1980s. Pick it up at your local independent book-seller, from UNC Press, or Amazon.

photo by Kristin Chavez

I’ve also done some oral history and archival collecting projects, including the Civil Rights History Project, supported by the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress, and Media and the Movement, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am currently PI of the LDF Oral History Project, a partnership with the NAACP LDF to document its history of justice litigation.

I teach courses on bad behavior, including a survey of crime and punishment in America. I also teach American Studies 210: This Place Called the South, and advanced course on oral history.