I am a professor of History; Black, Race & Ethnic Studies; and Biography & Memoir at The Graduate Center, CUNY. In 2011, I earned a Ph.D. in twentieth-century U.S. history, with minor fields in African diaspora history and transnational American studies. Before joining the Graduate Center, I held faculty positions in Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and Africana Studies at the University of Delaware. 

I consider myself an interdisciplinary historian, with research and teaching curiosities that reflect my eclectic imagination: African diasporic social movements, material and visual cultures, critical philanthropic studies, and life writing. 

I am the author of four books. Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement(Amistad/HarperCollins, 2023), which won an NAACP Image Award, the Hooks National Book Award, and Honorable Mention for the OAH Darlene Clark Hine Award; Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (St. Martin’s, 2019); Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019, with Kwame Brathwaite and Deborah Willis); and Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015), winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award. My articles have been published in the Journal of Southern History, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, The Black Scholar, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. I have also written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, and Harper’s Bazaar. Currently, I am completing an experimental biography of sculptor Augusta Savage. 

My research has been supported by institutions including New America/Emerson Collective, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the School of Advanced Study (London, UK). 
I have been engaged in service to the profession since graduate school, when I was an Organization of American Historians Diversity Fellow. Working closely with OAH staff, I helped plan the annual national conference, staffed the ALANA committee on the status of scholars of color, and helped organize the community college initiative. My work with the OAH—during its most progressive era—continues to guide my approach to institution building. I am a co-founder of the Black Women’s Biography Collective and TEXTURES, a working group on the material culture of global Black migration. I have co-organized conferences and symposia, including “UnBioed: Radically Reimagining Black Women’s Lives” at the University of Kentucky, “Writing and Publishing Black Women’s Biography” at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the “HBCU Material Culture Conference” at Dillard University. I was the director of the University of Delaware’s African American Public Humanities Initiative and chair of the Association of Black Women Historians nominating committee. I have served on the editorial advisory boards of Women’s Studies Quarterly, Fashion Studies, and UNC Press’s “Black Women’s History” Series. I currently serve on the advisory committees of the American Museum of Natural History’s Ice Cold exhibition and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s African American Fundraising Collecting Initiative.