I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Data and Information Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching graduate classes in archival science, information science, and humanistic qualitative inquiry. I also serve as the Coordinator of the Archives and Record Management Track.

In the past few years, a lot of my research has centered on the documentation of children in the historical record. Fatherhood impacted my research, inspiring me toward studying everyday children of the past, and avenues for documenting their lives through their own creations. My main concern has been the way that children's own ideas, worries, drawings, writings, and life experiences are difficult to account for within archival collections, which are the main sources of evidence about the past. Evidences of childhoods, especially ones children made themselves, are difficult to find, leading many to think that it is impossible to find traces of the child's own work in the archives. I have co-edited, with Dr. Melissa Freeman, a special issue of Qualitative Inquiry discussing the methodological complexities of locating children in the archives across the disciplines of history, educational history, art education, and adjacent fields.

My studies of children and childhood look at the lives of ordinary children --often anonymous and unremarkable-- through their materials within archives, like marginalia they left in books, letters they wrote and drawings they created.

In addition, as a former professional librarian and archivist, I write scholarship for the professional fields that advocates for child-oriented content standards, acquisition policies, and attention to the child's right to appear in the historical record.

I also write scholarship as a qualitative methodologist, especially integrating textual and literary criticism into qualitative research methods. I have applied postmodern theory to qualitative methods and post-qualitative methods, including concepts from Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. I have co-edited, with Dr. Elizabeth Adams St. Pierre, a special issue of International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education on the role of reading in qualitative inquiry. I have also written about close reading, list writing as a genre in research, and other pieces that emphasize the role of historical inquiry and textual studies within the humanistic social sciences.

I frequently publish about the history of educational theory and my own teaching within archives and information sciences, with both students and other colleagues.

I am open to PhD and master's students who wish to do qualitative research within archives and libraries, or work in children’s and youth history.