Position Title
Assistant Professor of American Studies
Welcome to my faculty page! I’m a writer, activist, and assistant professor of American Studies at UC Davis. Trained as a feminist cultural historian and critical theorist, I study the relationship between political violence, aesthetic mediation, and knowledge production. My current book project, In the Offing: Law-Founding Violence and the Moving Image of Lynching, engages the circulation of lynching’s material, discursive, and affective remains throughout the long photographic century to contest narratives of U.S. lynching culture’s post-civil rights demise. Recuperating radical left articulations of legal lynching as a form of class warfare, the book theorizes lynching photographs as moving images that illuminate the constitutive relationship of racial terror to global capitalism.
In 2023-2024, I am convening a UC Davis Humanities Institute Interdisciplinary Research Cluster dedicated to political education about lynching culture in California and its relationship to the violent policing of Indigenous, Black, Mexican, and AAPI people today. From 2019-2023, I was a member of the Racial Capitalism Working Group as well as the faculty advisory team for the Mike Henderson exhibition, “Before the Fire,” at the Manetti Shrem Museum.
I was a UC Davis Society of Hellman fellow in 2023. Prior to my appointment at UCD, I taught in the department of Media, Culture & Communication at New York University as a Provost postdoctoral fellow. From 2017-2018, I was a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow in African American Studies at UC Irvine. I have twice been awarded fellowships from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
- B.A., English, York University; M.A., Social & Political Thought, York University; Ph.D., History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz
- Society of Hellman Fellowship, UC Davis (2023)
- 20th-century African American Poetry
- Violence and Representation
- Black Feminist Cultural Production
- Introduction to Critical Theory
- Structures of Racial Feeling
- The Social Life of Social Death, Keywords for Black Feminism
- Decolonizing Media
- The Lynch Doctrine: ‘Rough Justice’ to ‘Stand Your Ground’
- critical theory, cultural studies, visual culture, Black study, feminist epistemology, political violence, history from below, the politics of affect, experimental poetics.
- Co-Edited Books Forthcoming in 2024: The Black Radical Tradition in the United States. Erin Gray and Ben Mabie, eds.
- Forthcoming: “The Incendiary Image of Lynching: Now! and the Red Summer of 1965.” Jump Cut (Fall 2023).
- "Grotesque Melonation in the Art of Mike Henderson." Mike Henderson: Before the Fire, 1965-1985. University of California Press, 2022.
- "Facing Emmett in the New Nadir" Critical Ethnic Studies 7:1 (Spring 2021)
- “Necrophagy at the Lynching Block.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21:1 (January 2015)
- “‘Words are Fleshy Ducts’: Lisa Robertson and the Runnel Theory of Poetry.” Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 14:5 (Spring 2011).
- “The Good Sentences of Sleep: Parasomnia and ’Pataplay in the Poetry of Angela Rawlings and Sylvia Legris.” Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 13:9 (Summer 2009).
- “(En)countering Mortality: Reflections on Live Knowing.” The International Feminist Journal of Politics 11:1 (March 2009).
- Introduction to “Lynching: A Weapon of National Oppression.” Viewpoint Magazine. January 9, 2017.
- “Anti-Lynching Laws Were Never Meant to Defend Black Lives: The Case of Jasmine Abdullah.” Truthout. June 15, 2016.
- “When the Streets Run Red: For a 21st-Century Anti-Lynching Movement.” Mute. January 31, 2015.
- Imagining America, American Studies Association, National Women’s Studies Association