I am a historian of the modern African diaspora whose work explores how Black women across the Americas used language, education, cultural institutions, and associational life to negotiate belonging across national and linguistic borders. My research examines Black internationalism, migration, racial uplift, and the politics of language in the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean, with particular attention to Costa Rica and Panama. I am currently a Beloved Community Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Associate in Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where I am revising my first book manuscript, Translating Racial Uplift: Black Women, Language, and Internationalist Politics, 1918–1985.

The book traces how Afro-Caribbean women and their communities adapted the practices and politics of racial uplift across changing political, linguistic, and generational contexts during the twentieth century. Moving from interwar Garveyism and Black print culture to women’s clubs, schools, cultural performance, and the transition from English-speaking Afro-Caribbean institutions into Spanish-dominant national life, I examine how Black women mediated the shifting relationship between diasporic identification and national incorporation. Through figures ranging from Garveyite organizers and Black women educators to Marian Anderson and Afro-Costa Rican writer Eulalia Bernard, the project shows how racial uplift was continually translated—across languages, institutions, generations, and national borders—as Black communities navigated the changing possibilities and constraints of citizenship and belonging in Costa Rica, Panama, and the wider Americas.

I earned my Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown University, where my dissertation, Translating Racial Uplift: Black Women, Language, and Internationalist Politics, 1918–1965, traced the transnational activism of Black women whose educational, linguistic, and political labor helped shape diasporic belonging in the modern world. My scholarship brings together Black internationalist thought, Black transnational feminism, and modern Caribbean, Central American, and African American history to illuminate the ways language, migration, gender, and political culture shaped Black life across the Americas. My work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of African American History, Black Central América(s): Ebbs and Flows of Hemispheric Blackness, Picturing Black History, Black Perspectives, and multiple edited collections, including The Cambridge History of Black Women in the United States.

As a committed public scholar, I bridge academic and community audiences through digital and public humanities platforms, oral history projects, and collaborative forums on Black women’s global activism. My research has been supported by Brown University’s Pembroke Center, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, the University of Pittsburgh, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the American Historical Association.