I am a historian of the Caribbean and African diaspora and an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California. Trained as an interdisciplinary historian, I study religion and racial formation in the modern Americas.

My first book, Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation (2024) examines these themes through the life of the first Black US consul and AME missionary to the Dominican Republic. I also explore evolving notions of race in the present through my ongoing ethnographic research with the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in the Dominican Republic.

I first became interested in studying race and religion in the Spanish Caribbean and Haiti when I spent ten months in the Dominican Republic as a Yale University Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow (2007-2009). This fellowship supported my first research experience at the United Nations Institution for the Research and Advancement of Women (INSTRAW) in Santo Domingo, where I also partnered with InteRDom and studied abroad with CIEE-Santo Domingo. 

While in Santo Domingo, I attended a small Dominican A.M.E. congregation in the heart of the city. A Chicago-suburb native, I grew up attending Bethel A.M.E. Church in Evanston, Illinois, where I learned A.M.E. doctrine and traditions. My participation in the “Black Church” abroad connected me to my African American roots at the same time that it opened the door to friendships and a whole new world of Latin American evangelical culture. My year of interacting with Dominican African Methodists led me to study the institutional history of the Dominican A.M.E. Church for my undergraduate senior thesis and as a doctoral student in the History Department at Duke University. Today, I maintain contact with current A.M.E. leaders and congregations in the United States and the Dominican Republic. These relationships continue to inform my research on Black Protestantism in the United States and Latin America.