Conversations, Programs, & Workshops
I offer public programs, conversations, and workshops exploring American mythologies, rural memory, frontier iconography, maritime worlds, historic landscapes, and the thin places where story, place, and identity meet. My work moves between Florida history, the American cowboy, working waterfronts, cattle culture, women’s rural imagination, and the symbolic landscapes that shape how we remember who we are.
Land, Water, Work & Legend
Steamboat Jack: The “Degenerate Scion of a Noble Line”
A program on Great Lakes maritime culture in the mid- and late nineteenth century, exploring how sailor iconography shaped American ideas about labor, morality, mobility, reform, and the American maritime experience.
Florida: A Different Kind of West
This program explores Florida as a frontier landscape shaped by cattle, water, migration, memory, and myth. Moving beyond the familiar imagery of the American West, it considers how Florida’s cow hunters, inland settlements, working landscapes, and uneasy relationship with wilderness reveal a different version of western identity. The program invites audiences to rethink the cowboy, the frontier, and the stories Americans tell about land, freedom, labor, and belonging.
Material Culture, Memory & Social Life
Reading the Stones: Cemeteries, Gravestones, and the Meanings We Leave Behind
This program explores cemeteries as landscapes of memory, belief, status, grief, and community identity. Through gravestone symbols, epitaphs, burial patterns, mourning customs, and cemetery design, audiences learn how to “read” historic cemeteries as cultural texts. The program considers what these places reveal about family, faith, class, death, belonging, and the ways communities choose to remember their dead.
Calling Cards and Social Codes: The Rituals of Introduction, Reputation, and Belonging
This program explores the world of calling cards and the social rituals that shaped nineteenth- and early twentieth-century introductions, visits, courtship, mourning, status, and respectability. More than simple pieces of paper, calling cards served as tools of identity and social navigation, revealing how people announced themselves, managed reputation, and negotiated belonging in public and private life.