Originally from Plainfield, New Jersey, I have led a peripatetic life. After graduating high school in 1973, I went west and spent seven years in northern California. In 1981, I received my B.A. in French literature from San Francisco State University. Thereafter, I worked for a year and a half at M.I.T. Press Journals in Cambridge, Mass, followed by nine years in Toronto, Canada, where I received my Ph.D. in Medieval Studies in 1992 at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University at Toronto. I spent a year and a half year in Washington, D.C. at Dumbarton Oaks, then two years at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, five years in Tempe at Arizona State University, and twenty-four years (so far) in Davis/Sacramento, where I taught in the Dept of History at UC Davis. Over the course of those years, I traveled to do my research. From 1989 until 2005, she spent time each year working in the State Archives of Venice. When I began the project on Edmond Dédé, the archives and libraries of New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Paris, and Bordeaux became my working ground. For the first 10 years of my life as an academic, I focused on the Mediterranean and, in particular, on the Venetian colony of Crete in the 14th and 15th centuries. My articles on domestic slavery in Italy and the eastern Mediterranean can be found as PDFs on Academia.edu. About ten years before retiring, I embarked on a project relating to US expatriates in France in the second half of the 19th century. That line of investigation led to the publication in 2017 of my book, The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World (Yale), in which I piece together from new evidence the life and working world of the composer and musician, Edmond Dédé (1827-1901), a free African-American born in antebellum New Orleans, who spent nearly four decades in France. 

Now, I luxuriate in reading, writing, traveling, cooking, spending time with friends, and all the things I didn't have time to do when I was working. And I'm never bored.