My first book, Habitual Drunkard: Compulsive Drinkers and the Dilemmas of Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century United States, is under contract with Rutgers University Press’s Critical Issues in Health and Medicine Series.

In this book, I argue that the nineteenth-century American quest to define, detect, and discipline compulsive drinkers transformed the civil law courtroom into an arena for contesting the thresholds of mental capacity, legal personhood, and full citizenship. From guardianship, also known as conservatorship, and asylum commitment to divorce and life insurance litigation, these gripping yet largely forgotten contests positioned inchoate medical framings of compulsion as a key characteristic demarcating the habitual drunkard from the moderate drinker. The reciprocal relationship between medicine and the law that defined the “habitual drunkard” in court and in the asylum anticipates the “addict” by producing tensions between badness and sickness that still define interventions in the lives of people with substance use disorders.

My next book, Incapable: Guardianship and the History of Mental Capacity in North America, which will be the first comprehensive history of guardianship from the colonial period to the present day, studies the creation, punishment, and control of mentally sick and disabled personhoods alongside and beyond carceral institutions. Addressing present-day legal and disability advocates as well as academic scholars, this book explains how the historical impulse to discipline and govern people deemed mentally unsound continues to pose structural obstacles to guardianship reform.

My research also appears in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the Law and History Review, Teaching History, Nursing Clio (forthcoming), Minnesota Medicine, and Alcohol, Psychiatry, and Society: Comparative and Transnational Perspectives, c. 1700-1990s (Manchester University Press). This research has received fellowship and grant support from the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Harvard Countway Library, the American Society for Legal History, the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation, and the New York State Archives.