ABOUT ME
I am a scholar of the African American literary tradition, queer history and literature, and American literature from the mid-19th century to the present. My forthcoming book Black Flights, maps the evolution of the flying African myth in 20th-21st century literature.
In my current position of Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, PA, I teach courses in African American literature and queer literature/history. I earned by PhD in English from the University of Iowa in 2021.
I have over eight years of experience teaching English and general education courses at Lafayette College (PA), Saint Joseph's University (PA), and the University of Iowa (IA). I earned numerous awards for my teaching at UI, including the English departmental W.R. Irwin Award for Excellence in Teaching, the university's Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, and the Huston Diehl Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship.
Regardless of the class title, my courses are always designed to investigate how writers and artists counter dominant ideologies of race, sexuality, and national belonging, forming alternative spaces and collectivities that foster creative and political production. For example, my course Literature of the (Post)Plantation: Reckoning with and Resisting the Legacies of the Plantation explores how the collapse of the Plantation system created shockwaves that continue to impact how Americans conceive of race and belonging today, and emphasizes resistance strategies to patterns of white supremacy. My Queer of Color Literature and Theory course examines the history of queer art and political action from the last 75 years via queer writers of color, including Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, and Arturo Islas. These syllabi and others can be found on my Teaching Materials page.
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