I am an interdisciplinary scholar who works in the fields of African American literature, Black feminism, and gender and sexuality studies. My book project, The Social Life of Black Feminism tells the story of Black Feminism through networks. Rather than focusing on exemplary individual women or on individual formal organizations, I am interested in the parallel development of networks of relationships between Black feminists and the infrastructure of Black feminist knowledge production and dissemination. In order to understand how second-wave Black feminism came to be, what it was, and how it shaped contemporary iterations of Black feminist activism and theory, we must examine the rich social and political worlds in which it was birthed. Ultimately this project asks how Black Feminism as a distinct, autonomous movement came into being. How did individual Black women do this work? What fueled and sustained them? How did their relationships with each other support or inhibit their intellectual and activist labor? This project draws on extensive archival research as well as a rich archive of understudied published works and several oral history interviews. My work has appeared and in Feminist Theory, Feminist Studies, The Washington Post, and Sinister Wisdom.

Newest Publications

“The Archaeological Impulse, Black Feminism, and But Some of Us Are Brave.” Special Issue. Feminist Studies. Feminist Studies 48, no. 1 (2022): 33-52.

“Despite antiabortion campaigns black feminists support abortion rights.” Made By History. The Washington Post. June 29, 2022.

“The Kentanji Brown Jackson Hearings Showed the Power of Black Sisterhood.” Washington Post Online. March 25, 2022.

“No more Ms. Nice Girl.” Sinister Wisdom: Special Tribute to Conditions magazine. no. 123 (2022).

Works in Progress

The Social Life of Black Feminism, 1968-1993 This in-progress book length manuscript builds upon my dissertation research to trace the emergence of Black Feminism as a distinct intellectual and social movement in the 1970s and 1980s. I attend to the social life of Black feminism by paying attention to the relationships between Black women, the sites of their work, and the infrastructure of Black feminist intellectual and social life the facilitated the growth of the movement.

“Revisiting Early Second-Wave Black Feminism: Alice Walker and Meridian“ Although Walker is best known as a feminist for her third novel The Color Purple, her Black feminist politics is evident in her much earlier work. This essay explores Walker’s early Black feminist theorizing during the 1970s. In particular, I analyze her second novel, Meridian, published in 1976 as a Black feminist novel. I argue that reading Meridian as a purposefully Black feminist text and placing it in the context of the development of Walker’s feminist politics and within her larger body of work allows us to better understand her early articulations of second-wave Black feminism and how cultural texts were crucial to early Black feminist theorizing.

Pat Parker’s 1975 Cross-Country Reading Tour A digital mapping project that uses archival material, specifically tour itineraries and posters advertising readings, to map where Black feminist literary culture thrived during this period and how it traveled. Drawing on information from Parker’s letters, her itinerary, and news coverage of her appearances, I will map the stops on Parker’s tour. This Carto map plots each tour stop, the type of venue she performed at, the specific venue and its location, as well as excerpts from her letters and media coverage describing the reading, and any promotional flyers that advertised it. In addition to making available data that is currently inaccessible to the public, this mapping project will help visualize where feminist reading communities existed in the United States in 1975 and how Parker as a Black, lesbian, feminist poet experienced them when she visited during her tour.

Peer Reviewed Articles

“The Archaeological Impulse, Black Feminism, and But Some of Us Are Brave.” Special Issue. Feminist Studies. Feminist Studies 48, no. 1 (2022): 33-52.

“‘Creating Justice Between Us’: Audre Lorde’s Theory of the Erotic as Coalitional Politics in the Women’s Movement.” Feminist Theory vol. 19, no. 1 (2018).