Dan is interested in the history of higher education, specifically early republican era colleges in trans-Appalachian West, and the relationships between boards, faculty, and presidents. He is currently researching how colleges used land as a means to finance themselves and the role boards of trustees leveraged their prestige with state and federal legislatures. These institutions depended on various forms of land dispossession, particularly of Native Americans. Through this topic, Dan hopes to explore the expansion of federal and state involvement in education during the first-half of the nineteenth century and how land markets influenced educational institutions. Dan's research looks at higher education institutions through an organizational lens to understand how land as a financial means shaped the legal and academic affairs of institutions. He focuses on connecting this research to contemporary educational issues as a joint Ph.D. student in the History department and in Penn GSE's Education, Culture, and Society (ECS) Program.