Overview
I specialize in nineteenth-century African American history, with particular expertise in intellectual history and Black political thought, slavery and emancipation, and racial capitalism. My book The Lowest Freedom recovers an unexamined tradition in nineteenth-century Black thought that locates the failures of emancipation not simply in political exclusion and racial violence, but in wide-ranging forms of economic dispossession that continued to define Black life in freedom. With Destin Jenkins, I co-edited a collection of essays titled Histories of Racial Capitalism. My current interests are in carceral studies and the histories of policing and mass incarceration. I am at work on a history of race and policing in nineteenth-century North America. I also maintain secondary interests in comparative Black/Indigenous history and Black/Asian American history.
I am currently accepting graduate students, and prospective students should feel free to contact me.
