Research & Scholarship

As a scholar, my research and teaching are interdisciplinary and intersectional, focusing on Black culture, history, the arts, and law. I am interested in the role citizenship and national belonging play in how people of African descent are represented in media and cultural texts, how legislation and policy affect equity and access to civil rights, and the various creative and strategic means by which Black people have resisted and exacted agency from within systems that marginalize them and deny their humanity.

My most recent book, When We Imagine Grace: Black Men and Subject Making (U Chicago P 2016), draws on critical race and gender studies, cultural theories, and U.S. jurisprudence in order to rethink the popular notion of crisis in black masculinity studies by privileging agency. My first book, Critical Appropriations: African American Women and the Construction of Transnational Identity (Louisiana State UP 2014), studies black women cultural producers’ appropriation of African Diasporic theories of cultural identity as an immobile form of transnationalism. An edited volume, Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century, (Duke UP 2020) is a collection of essays, interviews, and visual art that assesses various twenty-first century Black popular culture trends and issues. I recently completed a third single-authored monograph for which I was the Alisa Mellon Bruce Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Becoming Educated: A Midwest Story (Trillium 2024, forthcoming) uses narrative non-fiction, visual art, and music to tell the legal, historical, and social stories around public school desegregation in Columbus, Ohio, drawing on my own experiences as a Black student who was bused and as a parent of three Black sons. And a co-authored book, Black Women’s Stories of Everyday Racism: Narrative Analysis for Social Change (Routledge 2024, forthcoming), collaborates with eight African American women who share their experiences dealing with systemic racism in Central Indiana. I am editor of The Oxford Handbook on African American Women’s Writing.

My current research projects include When the Law Forsakes Us: Black Women and the Pursuit of Personhood (Oxford University Press, invited submission), a book project that uses a legal lens to analyze how the bodies of black women have functioned in relationship to the nation and black people's negotiation of citizenship in literature, visual art, popular culture, and public discourse.