My teaching interests lie at the intersection of race, gender and sexuality, my public-facing work focuses directly on issues of systemic racism and anti-Blackness, and my scholarship centers the lives of Black Women during slavery in the U.S. As a core faculty member in the Department of History, I’m honored to be affiliated with Gender Studies, American Studies, as well as African American and African Diaspora Studies, at IUB.

I’ve created and taught numerous undergraduate classes at IU that incorporate my research and my community-based justice work, such as “Wenches, Witches, Welfare Queens,” “Sex, Lies, and Diaries,” and “From Mammy to Michelle.” I also have a healthy roster of graduate readings courses and colloquia, including “African American History: to 1900,” “The Long Nineteenth Century in US History: 1790-1900,” “Black Women in US History,” “Gender in the Black Diaspora,” and “Slavery in the Atlantic World.”

I’m as passionate about my writing as I am about my work in the classroom. As an archival historian, I focus on the lives of enslaved and free Black Women in the Old South. My first book, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2011 and won four book prizes. It examines how Black women in Charleston acquired, defined, and defended their own visions of freedom — including, but not limited to, their involvement in long-term sexual unions with white men. 

This led to the subject of my new book, The Vice President’s Black Wife: The Untold Life of Julia Chinn, which focuses on the long-term alliance of Julia Ann Chinn, an enslaved Black woman, with U.S. congressman, senator, and, Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson.