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I am a scholar of religion and of religious ethics, with research interests in Africana and African American religions, the history of Black religious thought, and the dynamics of racial formation and self-fashioning. I am presently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University.

I completed my PhD in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University, where I also held fellowships at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, and the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America.

My current book project, Ethiopia of the Outstretched Arm: Ethiopianism, Racial Formation, and Redemption in Black Religious Thought, explicates the distinctive moral vocabulary, now often known as Ethiopianism, that was forged by a broad network of African Atlantic intellectuals and activists between 1829 and 1940. It attends to the ways key nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black thinkers advanced projects of African redemption and self-determination by drawing upon the language and imagery of Psalm 68:31 (KJV): "Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God."

My work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Lilly Endowment.