Research

“The Scream”

In Black Cool: One Thousand Streams of Blackness, ed. Rebecca Walker (forward by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). Soft Skull Press.(2012)



“Reflections on The Help”

In JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies



“Passing as a Woman(ist)?: A Look at Black Women’s Narratives in Tyler Perry’s Films”

Co-author (with Marcia A. Dawkins) in The Tyler Perry Reader edited by Ronald Jackson and Jamel Bell (forthcoming)



Multiracial or Post-race?: How Mixed Race Youth are Creating New Identities

This essay explores the ways multiracial young people are creating, maintaining and challenging racial identity formations in the US.


“As Shelters Against the Cold”: Women Writers of the Black Arts and Chicano Movements, 1965-1978

This dissertation explores the women writers of the Black Arts and Chicano movements in order to expose the ways these women used their writing both as literary output and political activism. While other studies have focused on either the Black Arts or Chicano movements, this (to my knowledge) is the first study to discuss them in tandem. This approach allows for more fully nuanced discussion of the women writers and points us towards areas of commonality and well as difference.


Mixed Race in the Age of Mrs. O

...written with Marcia A. Dawkins, Ph.D.

...pics borrowed from Mrs.O and New York Times websites

This study is designed to examine how mixed race identity is formulated and discussed by young adults in the United States. An intensely interdisciplinary project, we begin by discussing racial mixedness and identity “with a twist” as they pertain, not to President Obama but, to First Lady Michelle Obama. Self-identified as and accepted as “Black,” her mixed race ancestry is the subject of recent scrutiny.