I am an interdisciplinary scholar engaged in research on social movements, race, Black communities, and public history.
I am faculty in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at George Mason University. I was an Assistant Professor there from 2017-2024, and will start as an Associate Professor on August 25, 2024.
I was a 2020 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow, and a 2020 African American Digital Humanities Scholar at the University of Maryland-College Park. I was also a recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2022).
I am the author of the award-winning To FulFill These Rights: Political Struggle over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions (Columbia University Press 2019).
I have served as an affiliated research scholar at the Center for Advanced Social Science Research at New York University, and as a Social Science Research Council-Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Fellow. I received my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from New York University and my undergraduate degrees in English-Creative Writing and Sociology from the University of Southern California.
LATEST
+Order my book To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions! It is the winner of the Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Book Award from the Association of Black Sociologists, and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
+Read my recent publications in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity and Design and Culture.
+Read my article in The Black Scholar: “Notes on Black Archival Practice: A Relationship to Evidence of Black Life.”
+Read my article in EPD: Society & Space: “Urban Social Hauntings: Disappearing Gravestone Murals in Gentrifying Brooklyn.”Urban Social Hauntings” was referenced in “The Great Erasure” by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times.
+Learn about my digital humanities project Black Belt Brooklyn, through videos produced for the Black as X symposium
Image Credits: Matthew Birkhold