My teaching and scholarship are organized around fields of Black studies and transnational American studies. Within these fields I focus on topics related to the Black radical tradition, abolition politics, and social imaginaries and movements that emerge in the transnational interaction between U.S.-based Black radical and Arab/North African social and political movements. My current work focuses on the abolitionist politics of Afrofuturism as it developed in Cairo, Egypt during the height of Black power and Arab nationalist movements. These research interests are motivated by scholarly collaborations in Beirut, Lebanon and Cairo, Egypt.

My teaching and research focus on race, spatial inequality, carcerality, and social activism in the U.S. and Puerto Rico from the mid-20th century to the present. I’m currently at work on my first book, which traces the growth of punitive governance in contemporary Puerto Rico and details not only the state’s repressive force but also the many ways Puerto Ricans reject punitive policing as a solution to the complex social problems affecting the island. As an ASA member, I’ve served on the National Council and Graduate Student Committee, and I currently serve as co-coordinator for the Critical Prison Studies Caucus.

I locate my work in American studies at the intersection of Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Indigenous Studies. In NYU's English Department, I research and teach courses on comparative borderland literatures, decolonial social movement practice, and Indigenous and Black critiques of sovereignty and property. In each domain, I strive to rethink the racialized and gendered paradigms of Chicana/o indigeneity in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands through the rubric of Native and mestiza/o land tenure and dispossession. In particular, I focus on cultivating reading practices that decolonize the identities, temporalities, and territorialities of settler colonial dominance in the Americas.