I am an assistant professor of English at Spelman College, specializing in transatlantic eighteenth-century and Romantic literatures, critical race theory, and feminist history and theory. I hold a Ph.D. from Duke University, as well as B.A. and M.A. degrees from Bucknell University.

With the support of a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, I am completing my first book, Death Rights: Romantic Suicide, Race, and the Bounds of Liberalism. This project 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 project have also 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 anti-colonial 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 to bolster scholarship in the field operating from anti-colonial and anti-racist perspectives. Most recently, I co-edited, with Joel Pace, a special issue of Symbiosis entitled “New Directions in Transatlantic Romanticisms.”