My research has been funded by grants from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, African American Intellectual History Society, and the British Library, among others.
Negro Worker sketch, Hermina Huiswoud Papers, NYU Tamiment Archive
I am currently developing my first book manuscript, Oceanic Groundings: Left Internationalism and Black Feminist Journeying Through Insurgent Seas. Oceanic Groundings weaves together archives of anticolonial struggle and state repression, travel memoirs and shipboard writings, oral histories, and analysis of novels and plays. The project explores the radical politics of intimacy, solidarity, and learning that were routed through port cities and maritime vessels in the early twentieth century. The project is based upon archival research conducted in collections held in: the Netherlands, Trinidad and Tobago, the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa.
My essay, “Learn, then Learn Some More: The Worldly Travels of African American Women in the Early Twentieth Century,” explores the Black geographic praxis of domestic worker Juanita Harrison who traveled to 30+ countries in the 1920s-1930s as a blueprint for working-class place-making and resistance.
Gallery Caption, Vernon Library Exhibition 1936, Collection of Letters from Juanita Harrison to Alice M. Foster, ca 1919-1936 (Collection 1846). UCLA Special Collections, Box 1, Folder 4.