I am an assistant professor of English at Spelman College, specializing in transatlantic eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, critical race theory, and feminist history and theory.

My current book project, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism, examines how the concept of suicide was used to challenge Enlightenment liberalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Individual chapters focus on canonical and lesser-known writers of African and European descent, as well as investigations of the period's notions of property, sympathy, personhood, and the human. Parts of this work have been recognized with awards from the International Conference on Romanticism and the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. 

I have published essays on decolonial pedagogies, as well as questions of race, class, and gender in the works of Lord Byron, Frederick Douglass, Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley, and Sarah Wesley, whose manuscripts I helped to uncover. In 2018, I founded the Race and Empire Studies caucus within the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism in order to bolster scholarship in the field operating from decolonial and anti-racist perspectives.

Born in the former Soviet Union and raised in Brooklyn, NY, I hold a Ph.D. in English from Duke University, as well as B.A. and M.A. degrees from Bucknell University.