I am a doctoral candidate in the English department with a graduate certificate in American Studies. I specialize in African American literature, history, and culture, with an emphasis on Black feminist thought and popular representations of Black womanhood from the nineteenth century to the present.

My research broadly investigates the persistence of recovery as a mandate for both creative and scholarly writing about Black life. In my dissertation, “Silence and Noise: Archival Politics, Historical Recovery, and Sally Hemings’s America,” I argue that representations of Sally Hemings across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries illuminate the dialectic between historical erasure and imaginative restoration as central to both the African American literary tradition and the shifting parameters of American national identity and racial exclusion. This project employs literary and rhetorical study as a way into conversations at the crossroads of Black studies, American studies, Black feminist historiography, and cultural studies.

An article drawn from my dissertation is forthcoming in the fall 2025 issue of Studies in American Fiction. Outside of my dissertation research, I have a chapter forthcoming in 2026 in an edited collection on Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, which will be published as part of the Feminist Wire Books series by the University of Arizona Press.