I am a Professor of English at the University of Washington in Seattle. My scholarship is in African American literary studies of the 20th and 21st centuries. My most recent book, Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life (NYU Press, 2021), tracks how age for people of the Black diaspora has been historically constituted as “untimely.” Black Age argues that over various phases of the transatlantic slave trade, the Black body had been separated from hegemonic relations to liberal humanist measures of time on various scales. Constituted through processes of violence and reasoning that alienated bodies from historical, developmental, and legal schedules of time, Black age became contingent, malleable, and suited for the needs of enslavement. My first book, Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), argues that the multiracial movement of the 1990s and 2000s was symptomatic of irreconcilable and disavowed losses of second-wave feminism, evidenced in the foreclosure of interracial feminist alliances.
Awards:
Honorable Mention, Pop Culture Association's Harry Shaw and Katrina Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African American Popular Culture Studies for Black Age: Oceanic Lifespans and the Time of Black Life, 2022
African American Review’s Darwin T. Turner Prize for “Any Other Age: Vampires and Oceanic Lifespans," 2016