Invited Lectures and Talks

  • “Archivally Bound and Confounded, Revisited: Sex Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century” Challenges in Researching the Shadow Economy: A Methods Symposium on Forced Labour, Sponsored by the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences, London, UK, October 15, 2016.
  • “Mobilizing Against Trafficking: Transnational Feminist Coalitions against ‘Consuming’ Women’s Bodies” Transnational Mobilization for Social Justice in the Nineteenth Century Transatlantic World, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, April 28 – 30.
  • “Protecting White Slaves or Policing Prostitutes?: Sex Trafficking, the FBI, and the Mann Act, 1900 – 1941,” Sex, Gender, and the Carceral State, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Northeastern University, March 18, 2016.
  • “White Slaves and Moral Borders: The Enforcement of Anti-Sex Trafficking Policy in the United States, 1904 – 1941,” Conference on Human Trafficking, Labor Migration and Migration Control in Comparative Historical Perspective, Pozen Family Center for Human Rights, University of Chicago, October 16 – October 17, 2015.
  • “The FBI, the White Slave Traffic Act, and ‘Any Other Immoral Purpose’,” Trafficking, Smuggling, and Illicit Migration, University of London, Birkbeck, UK, June 18 – June, 2015.
  • “The FBI’s White Slavery Legacy,” Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Workshop, Department of History, The Ohio State University, April 2, 2015.
  • “Policing Wives and Prostitutes: The Enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act,” Amerika-Institute, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität-Munich, July 3 – July 5, 2014.
  • “Protecting the Young and the Innocent: Age, Consent, and the Enforcement of the White Slave Traffic Act,” When is a Child a Slave? Children’s Labor and Children’s Rights, 1760 – 2013, University of Connecticut, Storrs, October 18, 2013.
  • “Local Legal Cultures, the Spread of National Prostitution Policy, and the Mann Act,” American Studies in Transatlantic Perspective: Critical Regionalism in Politics and Culture, The Bavarian American Academy in Munich-5th International Summer Academy, Munich, Germany, May 20 – June 3, 2013.
  • “The FBI’s Local White Slavery Corps: The Fight Against Sex Trafficking and the Growth of the Associative State, 1910 – 1919,” Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, New Haven, CT, March 27, 2013.
  • “Enforcing the White Slave Traffic Act: The FBI and Anti-Sex Trafficking Law Enforcement, 1910 – 1941,” Working Group on Modern Slavery and Trafficking, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, February 21, 2013.
  • “The White Slave Traffic Act: A Useable Past and the Deep Roots of Modern Day Slavery,” Abolition Past and Present: Scholars, Activists, and the Challenge of Contemporary Slavery, Gilder Lehman’s 14th Annual International Conference, Yale University, New Haven, CT, November 8 – 10, 2012.
  • “The Immigration Bureau goes Undercover Searching for White Slavery,” International Security Studies Colloquium, Yale University, New Haven, CT, October 17, 2012.
  • “The FBI’s White Slave Division: The Creation of a National Regulatory Regime to Police Prostitutes in the United States, 1910 – 1917,” Fighting Drink, Drugs and Venereal Diseases: Global Anti-Vice Activism, 1870 – 1940, Monte Verità, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Ascona, Switzerland, April 1 – 4, 2012.
  • “Beyond White Slavery: Policing Women and the Growth of the FBI, 1900 – 1941,” Center for Multicultural and Gender Studies, Women and Gender Research Collaborative, Brown Bag Research Seminar, November 30, 2011.
  • “The FBI Takes on NYC’s Vice Queens: The War on Crime and White Slavery,” Phi Alpha Theta Brown Bag Series, Texas State University - San Marcos, San Marcos, TX, April 5, 2011.
  • “Wandering Wives, Deviant Daughters, and Pesky Prostitutes: Moral Boundaries under the Mann Act, 1900 – 1941,” P.E.O Sisterhood, Chapter V, Columbus, OH, April 28, 2008.
  • “Suppression of the Traffic: White Slavery and the League of Nations, 1919 – 1936,” Harvard Graduate Student Conference on International History, Cambridge, MA, March 14 – 15, 2008.

Conferences and Annual Meetings

  • “The Marital Dimensions of White Slavery: Questions about Women’s Mobility, Citizenship, and Sexuality in the Global Anti-Sex Trafficking Movement,” Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, Hofstra University, June 1 – June 4, 2016.
  • “Boundaries, Borders, and Scale: Methodological, Conceptual, and Practical Problems with Researching Sex Trafficking,” Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders, and Sexualities, Hofstra University, June 1 – June 4, 2016.
  • “Moral Border Control: US Compliance with International Anti-Sex Trafficking Policy during World War II” Organization of American Historians, New Orleans, LA, April 6 – April 9, 2016.
  • “Tracking the Traffic: The League of Nations’ Investigations into Sex Trafficking,” Organization of American Historians, New Orleans, LA, April 6 – April 9, 2016.
  • “A Moral Quarantine: The FBI’s White Slave Division, 1910–1917,” American Historical Association, Denver, CO, January 5 – 8, 2016.
  • “Sexual Surveillance and Moral Border Control,” European Social Science History Conference, Valencia, Spain, March 30 – April 2, 2016.
  • “Lessons of Enforcement: The FBI, The White Slave Traffic Act, and ‘Any Other Immoral Purpose’,” Using Slavery to Make Slavery History, Historians Against Slavery hosted by the National Underground Freedom Center, Cincinnati, OH, September 24 – September 27, 2015.
  • “The FBI Investigates Interstate Sexual Violence: The Mann Act, 1910 – 1941,” Historicizing Rape, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK, July 8 – July 10, 2015.
  • “The Long History of the International Anti-Sex Trafficking Movement,” Organization of American Historians, St Louis, MO, April 16 – April 19, 2015.
  • “Beyond White Slavery: The Enforcement of the Federal White Slave Traffic Act in the United States, 1910 – 1941,” Fourth Annual European Conference on World and Global History, hosted by the European Network in Universal and Global History, École Normale Supérieure Paris, Paris, France, September 4 – September7, 2014.
  • “The FBI’s War on the High-Handed and High-Living Vice Queens: Sex Trafficking and Elite Prostitution in Depression-Era New York City,” Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, University of Toronto, May 22 – May 25, 2014.
  • “World War I, the FBI, and the Mann Act: The White Slave Officer and Camp MacArthur,” Southern History Association, St. Louis, MI, October 31 – November 3, 2013.
  • “The Associative Surveillance State: The White Slave Division, 1910 – 1917,” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Washington, DC, June 20 – 22, 2013.
  • “Policing Disorderly Homes: The FBI, the Mann Act, and the Family, 1919 – 1941,” American Historical Association, New Orleans, LA, January 5, 2013.
  • “Sex and the Southern City: Female Sexuality and Vice in Urban Environments-Comments,” The Southern Association of Women’s Historians Conference, Fort Worth, TX, June 7 – 10, 2012.
  • “Enforcing a Moral Quarantine: The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910,” Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, June 9 – 11, 2011.
  • “White Slavery under J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau of Investigation: The Federal Policing of Interracial Sex under the Mann Act during the 1920s and 1930s,” Organization of American Historians, Washington, DC, April 7 – 10, 2010.
  • “Under Suspicious Circumstances: The Bureau of Investigation Enforces the Mann Act, 1900 – 1915,” Modern U.S. Seminar, Department of History, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, February 12, 2010.
  • “Wandering Wives, Philandering Parents, and Deviant Daughters: Policing Moral Boundaries under the Mann Act, 1910 – 1929,” Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Minneapolis, MN, June 12 – 15, 2008.
  • “Interrogating Affairs: Policing Moral, Racial, and Gender Boundaries under the Mann Act, 1919 – 1929,” American Historical Association, Washington, DC, January 3 – 6, 2008.
  • “‘Publicity Means Opposition’: Conflicts between Local, State-wide, and National Suffrage Organizing Tactics in the Ohio Suffrage Campaign of 1914,” Graduate Symposium on Women’s and Gender History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March 8 – 10, 2007.