I am a cultural and intellectual historian of race and race-making in the 19^th and 20^th century United States, quite expansively considered. This means that I write, teach, and think across several hundred years about phenomenon that transcend the nation-state - specifically, empire and enslavement, migration and movement culture - and that my research pushes on the boundaries of national, or "American," historiography.

My research output includes four single-authored monographs, one co-authored monograph, one edited collection of essays, and well over a dozen peer-reviewed essays and book chapters. Much of this work has the distinctive texture of biography, emphasizing the personal and psychological, the private and the visceral. Altogether, this collection of books, essays, chapters, conference papers, and op-eds has helped to collapse what had once been rock-hard distinctions between "American history," "African American history," and "world history," demonstrating that what were once well-segregated subfields are more exciting (often in ways that surprise and confound) when brought together.

My work moves about chronologically, shifting from the early nineteenth century to the present, from the hemispheric history of slaveholding to the intense political gravity of Black celebrity in the age of human rights. This topical mobility, I believe, is a great strength, affording me a unique sense of the longer-term contours of race and race-making. It allows me to more rigorously conceptualize patterns of racialization that connect the local and the individual with the international, the global, and the structural.

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President's Award for Excellence in Faculty Governance, Brown University, 2023.

Faculty Fellow, “In the Afterlives and Aftermath of Ruin” Seminar, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, 2022-2023.

Mary Turpie Prize for Distinguished Teaching, Advising, and Program Development, American Studies Association, 2010.

Distinguished Alumni Award, School of Arts and Humanities, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, 2010.

Lynette S. Autry/NEH Visiting Fellow, Humanities Research Center, Rice University, Spring 2010.

Honorable Mention, 2009 Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Award, Caribbean Studies Association, for American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation.

Postdoctoral Fellowship, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University, 2001-2003.

Best Book of 2001 on the History of Race and Ethnicity, American Political Science Association, for The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940.

Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2001.

Associate Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Slavery, Abolition, and Resistance Program, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University, 2001.

Nominee, Faculty of the Year Award, Disability Awareness Association, Washington State University, 2001.

Research Travel Grant, John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African-American Documentation, Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library, Duke University, 2001.

New Faculty Seed Grant, Washington State University, 2001.

Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant for Research in European, African, and Asian History, American Historical Association, 2000.

Excellence Fellowship, Department of History, Rutgers University, 1998-1999.

Predoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, 1998.

American Studies Association
Organization of American Historians
Society of American Historians

As a faculty member at a high-touch “university-college,” I believe very strongly in undergraduate and graduate teaching. My undergraduate classes range from broad surveys of  American mass culture to topical electives and required capstone classes - all are regularly full or  oversubscribed. Many of my classes emphasis project-based learning and group collaboration. I have served as an honor’s thesis reader each year, and work closely with my  advisees on every aspect of their research and composition. I work just as closely with graduate  students on their pedagogy, their research, and their professionalization, and have overseen well  over two dozen dissertations. I’ve taught exceptional and amazing students in classes that range  from writing-intensive and research-intensive to project-based and performance-based at small  liberal arts colleges, parochial colleges, big public R1s, elite “hidden Ivies,” and Brown. I’ve  taught in Gen Ed curricula, in the open curriculum, and in most of the things that lie between.  I’ve taught small seminars of six students, large lectures of two hundred, study abroad classes,  innumerable independent studies, and a Winter-session class on Broadway musicals that closed  with a bus-ride to Manhattan to see Hamilton. I've taught elementary school, high school, college-aged, and older, adult learners. And I have been involved in every step of curricular  creation, from the very first pencil scratch on paper about a possible new degree to the final  meeting with a state higher education board needed to approve a new BA. At Brown, I teach in three rather  different undergraduate concentrations – Africana Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies  – and advise first year undergraduate students who come with interests that span the university.