I became really interested in the history of chronological age when I first began working on a book on the history of child marriage. It became clear to me that while American law was riddled with references to chronological age, age was often used arbitrarily and sometimes reliance upon age had unintended consequences, especially when it came to regulation of sexuality and differences of sex and race.

When I met the historian Corinne T. Field at a conference (the Society for the History of Children and Youth in 2011), I found someone just as obsessed with age as I was. The result has been the most interesting intellectual collaboration of my career.  Together we edited and contributed to Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (NYU Press, 2015) and a special forum in the American Historical Review called “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis”(2020). You can listen to me and Cori talking about the forum in an AHR podcast here.

Uniting my interests in the history of age and sexuality, I have contributed essays to The Routledge History of American Sexuality (ed. Kevin Murphy, Jason Ruiz, and David Serlin) and Heterosexual Histories (ed. Rebecca L. Davis and Michele Mitchell). With Rachel Hope Cleves and Averill Earls, I also coedited and provided the introduction to a special issue of Historical Reflections called “Sex Across the Ages: Restoring Intergenerational Dynamics to Queer History” (2020).