I am a scholar of modern drama & performance, African American literature, and late 19th- and early 20th-century expressive cultures. My research and my teaching extend across theater & literary studies, Black studies, and queer, feminist, & social theory. My current book project, The Teaching Stage: Performance, Pedagogy, and Ugly Progress, examines how minoritized artists and dissident communities contested the modernizing reforms and democratic promises of Progressive education amidst the crises of the early 20th century, and risked disrupting the still common sense that teachers and teaching should sustain the nation’s optimism and secure its future.
A 2025-2026 Cotsen Junior Fellow at Princeton University, I also held a Ruth Stephen Fellowship at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. I served as curatorial and archival assistant on the 2023 exhibit Toni Morrison: Sites of Memory, and am a playwright.