About Me:

I’m Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA. I specialize in modern and contemporary literature, with a particular focus on African diaspora literature from the nineteenth century to the present. My scholarship explores theories of race and modernity, social justice and ethics, and historical violence and continuing forms of inequality. Three key questions have animated my research in the fields of postcolonial, U.S., and African diaspora literature: the relation between past and present; how aesthetic and political forms connect; and the circulation of racial forms across time and space.

You can learn about my research here and here. Recent work has focused on cultures of the Black Atlantic, transnationalism and American literature, and refugee and migration studies. For the past few years, I’ve been spearheading a set of initiatives to build more infrastructure for postcolonial thought, imagined as a comparative, cross-disciplinary, and revisionist endeavor.

I am currently writing two books: “Aesthetics of Refuge,” a book about twenty-first century refugee literature and culture, and “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found,” a study of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival.