As a versatile scholar, I speak the language of Black Studies, history, digital humanities, critical AI studies and computation, health humanities, and health informatics, bringing these fields into conversation to examine Black cultural traditions—alongside questions of data and technology. More broadly, I center Black contestation as a critical lens and a mode of survival, speculation, and transformation across time and space.
My first book, Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020) and argues that Black newspapers fostered sexual expression, agency, and identity in the first half of the twentieth century.
My forthcoming book, Power in the Pews: Contesting the Pulpit in the Early Twentieth Century Black Church (NYU Press, 2027), focuses on the early twentieth-century Black Church as a site of intra-racial contestation.
In addition, I am the co-editor of the collection, A Full Measure of Freedom: The Black Press at 200 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026), which commemorates the 200-year anniversary of the founding of the Black Press in 1827.
As the author of the field-defining article, “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities,” I have played a critical role in establishing the black digital humanities as a viable approach to digital scholarship.
I am currently developing several projects. The first examines the intersections of AI and race, arguing that algorithms have produced and shaped Black culture in the 21st century, constructing what I term “synthetic blackness.” My second project is a study of the long 1980's, race, and health. Also, I am writing a collection of short stories about African Americans' lived encounters with Ghana.
As the primary lead on two black digital humanities projects, The Black Press@200 Project and COVID Black, I remain committed to public-facing work. I also serve as the director of an initiative to use AI to develop a digital research tool on Black women and breast cancer.
My work has been externally supported by The Mellon Foundation, The American Council of Learned Societies, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Social Science Research Council, and The Spencer Foundation.
