History Graduate Students

Profile

Sarah is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History. She studies twentieth century American political economy with a particular eye toward farm policy and the role of farmers in its construction.

Her dissertation, entitled “Little Tobacco: The Business and Bureaucracy of Tobacco Growing in North Carolina, 1920-1980,” asks how tobacco growers influenced policy during the twentieth century. In a short amount of time, tobacco farmers went from being buffeted about a marketplace they did not understand, let alone control, to structuring, expanding and defending the market for their crop.

Broadly, Sarah's research picks at the junctures between state and society, public and private, and production and consumption. In these interstitial spaces, producers made consumers, farmers grew markets, and state regulation of production shaped the literal consumption of agricultural commodities.

At Princeton, Sarah's research has been supported by Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars and the Program in American Studies. She graduated from Harvard in 2007 with an AB in Social Studies.