PHOTO BY BENJAMIN CORDA
WHO
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma. For the academic year 2022-23, I held the M. H. Abrams Fellowship at the National Humanities Center. Prior to joining the University of Oklahoma, I was Assistant Professor and Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston, where I worked for twelve years.
Born and raised in Macon, GA, I ventured north to attend Sarah Lawrence College, where I earned a BA with concentrations in French and Literature. I completed my MA and PhD in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. The two years I lived in France, first during my junior year abroad and then as a Fulbright Teaching assistant, were critical to my intellectual development.
In December 2020, I completed BIG Power Yoga’s 200-hr Teacher Empowerment Program. I enjoy biking, hiking, and swimming. I currently live with my family in Norman, Oklahoma.
WHY
Although I work in literary and cultural studies, I am drawn to questions of power and history. I approach literary and cultural objects from what they might tell us about the operations of power in history. I suspect my interest in these subjects has a lot to do with the fact that I grew up in mostly working-class Black communities in the South during the Reagan/Bush years.
I spent my junior-year abroad in Paris because I had been studying French since high school and I fashioned myself as following in the footsteps of African American literary exiles like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Little things I experienced in Paris like reduced-rate movie tickets for students, made me wonder why American society was bereft of such social programs despite its riches. These questions percolated and fueled my interest in the Cold War and my attempt to understand its impact on US domestic politics, specifically the Civil Rights movement. Recently, my interest in the Cold War has led me to consider the massive role of surveillance, intelligence, and government secrecy in American society.
Ultimately though, I am interested in narratives and how they either aid or hinder our understanding of ourselves, our world, and our place in our world.
HOW
My framework is comparativist and global in its breadth. I tend to be drawn to periods, figures, and texts that speak to African American engagement at the global level. In my current project this is most visible in the travel narratives of African Americans who went on State Department-sponsored trips to India in the 1950s. As a comparativist the stories that most interest me involve some sort of translation or living between cultures and languages.
Ultimately, my aim as a scholar and teacher is to connect the dots between the historical and cultural context from which meaning arises in a given text. For example, when I teach Shakespeare’s Othello I want students to understand the historical significance of Othello being referred to as a “Barbary horse.” More than simply a racist epithet, the slur alludes to the specific history of Portuguese traders who bred horses on Cape Verde, which they traded for African captives on the West African coast in the 16th century. This trade inaugurated the Transatlantic trade which brought my ancestors to the so-called New World.