University of Chicago, Ph.D. 2006

American and African American Literature; The Idea of Black Culture; The American Novel after 1850; Slavery in the Atlantic World; Media Aesthetics

I'm currently at work on two new book projects. The first is called Artful Evasion: Black Characters and American Moral Life. Artful Evasion focuses on how Black characters in American literature shape ongoing scholarly and public debates about what it means to truly confront the moral challenges we often want to avoid. In addition to Artful Evasion, I'm writing A Philosophy of Black Storytelling. This book focuses on relationships between musical experience, literary narrative, and the moral aphorisms that guide us in dark times

My most recent book, Soul: A Brief History of Black Cultural Life (Yale University Press, 2026) begins with the question: How did enslaved Africans turn America’s infamous failure into the greatest moral occasion of modern Western life?  Soul explores the relationship between Black individuals, places, and communities that grappled with horrific strife to reimagine American life and equality in earnest. Whereas Soul is my best effort to show that a stable emphasis on self-sacrificing morality underscores the rich diversity of Black cultural life in the US, my previous books focus squarely on the instabilities and contradictions that pervade artistic archives such as African American modernisms, Melville studies, and US slavery studies. My books analyze oppositions such as person/thing, subject/object, and history/counterhistory to conceptualize disturbing scenes of social conflict in 19^th and 20^th century American fictions. By rediscovering the force of dyads like person/thing and history/counterhistory at their intersection, I produce philosophically generative readings, readings that disclose the contours of personhood and unveil concrete ways to inhabit and express what it means to be historical.