My research and scholarship have been devoted to finding historical explanations for racial conflict in British and European societies, and exploring the ways these societies have been shaped by their participation in empirebuilding. My book in progress, Workers Without Borders: Outsiders and Insiders in an Industrial Society, 1850-1939, will examine how local and global migration shaped social relations, with particular focus on race and culture, in one rapidly industrializing British port. The project will challenge the prevalent view of post-1945 migrants from the formerly colonized world as disruptive to the harmony of a previously culturally and racially homogeneous society. It will do so by documenting a prior century of migration and of cultural and racial dynamism and diversity.

I teach an array of specialized courses that take Europe as a whole, rather than one individual country, as the unit of analysis. In these we seek to discover what is commonly and uniquely European while acknowledging Europe’s internal diversity and its many links to the world beyond. These courses include "Women in Europe;" "War, Peace, and Social Change in Twentieth Century Europe;" "Work, Culture, and Power," a cross-disciplinary labor and social history course emphasizing the lessons of European history; and "The Rise and Fall of European Empires" (in pending approval).

Although most of the above courses are open to graduate students, I have also taught graduate colloquia on the history of European imperialism; of women in Europe; of "Outsiders in European History," ("migrants, invaders, minorities, outcasts, and the enemy within..."); the core course in the Comparative Women’s and Gender history curriculum; and the Modern European History graduate research seminar. In all of these courses I emphasize the fluidity of national, racial, and gender identities, the mobility of populations, particularly in the industrial period, and how changing class, gender, and racial relationships reflected and also affected the nature of European societies. The graduate courses are further designed to acquaint students with a range of methodological approaches and to equip them with the analytical tools they will need to pursue scholarly careers.

Publications include:
"We Ask for British Justice": Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1994);

"The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth Century Britain: the Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925" Journal of British Studies 33, 1(January 1994);

"`Keeping the Natives Under Control’: Race Segregation and the Domestic Dimensions of Empire, 1920-1939," International Labor and Working Class History 44 (Fall 1993):141-177;

"Social Networks and Organization Building in Britain’s Interwar Black Communities," in Gabriella Hauch, ed., Geschlecht - Klasse - Ethnizitt: 28er Tagung der Historikerinnen und Historiker der Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiterbewegung (Wien: Europaverlag, 1993), 171-188;

"Women `of a Very Low Type’: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Late Imperial Britain," in Laura Frader and Sonya Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 165-190;

"`A Maritime Race’: Masculinity and the Racial Division of Labor in British Merchant Ships, 1900-1939," in Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, eds.,

Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920 (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 169-188;

"Labour Migration, Racial Formation, and Class Identity: Some Reflections on the British Case," North West Labour History, (1995).