ABOUT ME

I was raised by a southern U.S. family in New Jersey and I consider the south home. I come from a poor, working-class background and I am a first-generation college student. My degrees have allowed me to traverse spaces considered outside of my race and class, which is not lost on me. My life's work centers diasporic Blackness and collective liberation. It emerges from my love of discourses in Black cultural production, material culture, and embodiment.

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As a womanist, dress, and Black culture scholar, I combine gender, race, and sexuality as analytic frameworks in the archives that reform and expand mainstream feminist theory to incorporate racial and cultural differences, with a particular focus on the Black diaspora. My research agenda fuses womanist constructs with embodiment constructs to make a case for increased dialogue between the visual, sensory, and material-based methods of Black liberation. 

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My pedagogical and theoretical grounding are in decolonization methodologies. I take my cues from the Indigenous people's on whose land I was born, raised, and live on. I also follow in the footsteps of centuries of Black abolitionists and liberationists before me. I am indebted to a lineage of warriors who envision Black liberation and Indigenous sovereignty.