I am an Associate Professor of English in Global Black Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I specialize in African American literature and literature of the African diaspora. Before coming to UW-Madison, I taught African American, Caribbean, and African literature, first-year writing, and cultural studies at California State University, Northridge in the Department of Africana Studies from 2012-2022.

My research interests focus on nineteenth- through twenty-first-century literatures of the African diaspora, comparative literary studies of slavery (historical and contemporary narratives of enslavement and freedom), theorizations of the African diaspora, cultural memory, and transnational racial formation. More broadly, I am interested in questions of genre, the archive, visual culture, the Black Arts Movement, ethnography, and representations of Black women in literature and popular culture. Most recently, I have been exploring interdisciplinary approaches to promoting Black maternal health.

I earned my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 2012 and completed my bachelor’s degree at Stanford University in Comparative Literature and Spanish in 2002.