I am a historian of the twentieth-century United States who studies the historical intersections of the United States, Canada, and the African Diaspora.
My dissertation, “From the North Star to the Black Star: African North Americans and the Search for a Land of Promise, 1919-1985,” won numerous prizes.
My manuscript, Cross-Border Cosmopolitans: The Making of a Pan-African North America, 1919-1992, situates fundamental questions of twentieth-century U.S. history—immigration, civil rights, racial identity, radicalism, surveillance and state power—within a North American diasporic frame. It exposes the connective tissues that tie twentieth-century North American Pan-Africanism to the Great Migration and its antecedent, the Underground Railroad. It integrates and juxtaposes community-building and freedom struggles in the United States and Canada, while remaining attuned to the influence of the Caribbean Basin as a site of anti-colonial resistance and a source of activists who imported a Commonwealth, class, and color consciousness to the North American mainland. Cross-Border Cosmopolitans provides one of the first historical accounts of how the U.S. and Canadian governments colluded to undermine black citizenship.
I am interested broadly in Social and Cultural History, African (North) American History, Chattel Slavery in the Americas, Urban History, post-Reconstruction Black Labor, Black Internationalism, Black Nationalism, Surveillance and Counter-Subversion, Immigration, Deportation, and Civil and Human Rights.
I have forthcoming publications on the power of petitions during the Civil Rights Movement, as well as an edited journal.
The Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation
The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada
Visiting Scholar-Senior Resident Fellow, Massey College, University of Toronto
SHASS Visiting Scholar and Pre-Doctoral Fellow at MIT