Author of Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775-1995 (which earned me an MLA William Scarborough Prize) and King’s Vibrato: Blackness, Modernism and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., both published by Duke Univ. Press, I am also the proud co-editor with Shawn Michelle Smith of Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Additionally, I have authored a short biography of Langston Hughes for junior high and high school students, and have several scholarly articles to my name, ranging topically from the religious roots of African American literature to photography, disability, and black oratory. 

Currently, I'm at work on two monographs. The first is a book tentatively titled Objects and Uplift: Frederick Douglass, New Materialism, and the Black Hermeneutics of Things which follows from my interest in black studies and scholarly currents in post-humanism. My second project is a volume titled Black Trees. It is a critical meditation on race, ecology, and tree life in the US. 

In general, I write and teach in nineteenth- and twenty-century African American literature, nineteenth-century American literature after 1865, and black cultural studies, especially its intersections with sound studies and visual culture.