My scholarship theorizes the legacies of slavery and emancipation in the Caribbean and throughout the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. I am interested in how the conversation between literature, visual cultures, and historical archives shed light on questions of freedom and sovereignty—and, in turn, how the struggle for freedom and self-determination shapes aesthetic form. My work is informed by the study of literatures in English, Black studies, Caribbean studies, and Black and transnational feminisms.

My first book, Desiring Freedom: Counter-Imaginaries of Work, Sex, and Family after West Indian Emancipation (University of Chicago Press, November 2026), examines how British Caribbean literature and art offers desire as freedom, in contrast to the precepts of wage work and domesticity on which emancipation was premised. Instead, as I show, these works imagine women to survive by creative means, consort with lovers, raise children under circumstances that suit them, and share rather than bequeath their resources. For me, desire is an amorous feeling, the drive to experiment rather than produce, and the act of reaching for new forms of freedom—even when it is thwarted. 

My second major project is titled Suspension, and is interested in theorizing how aspirations to repair chafe against the unresolved legacies of slavery, indenture, and colonialism. I am also engaged in projects that re-examine the legacies of prominent Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic intellectuals such as C. L. R. James, Sylvia Wynter, and Barbara Christian, particularly their impact on literature and literary criticism.

I lend my interdisciplinary and transnational training to my undergraduate and graduate teaching and mentorship. In addition to projects in my core areas of expertise, I have also overseen projects in other, ongoing areas of specialization: African American women's writing of the 1970s and 1980s; Black philosophy; contemporary Asian American and Asian diaspora literature and politics; feminist, queer, and trans theory; and the workplace novel.

Among my affiliations and commitments on campus, I currently serve as the inaugural Director of Research and Programming at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and am an associate member of the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. I earned my Ph.D. in American Studies, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Yale University in 2017.