I received my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2010, where I was awarded the Diane Hunter Prize for the Best Dissertation Submitted in English. After postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the Freie Universität Berlin, I joined Berkeley’s English Department in the Fall of 2011 as an ACLS New Faculty Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor.

I am presently writing a book on disability and the social geography of race in the postbellum United States. Entitled Slow Moves the Pageant, this project draws on a richly interdisciplinary archive to explore how material histories of disability shaped the changing meaning of freedom in the years and decades following slavery. In particular, I track how the emergence of “disability” as a coherent social category in the latter half of the nineteenth century established a new vocabulary for talking about “race” – a vocabulary with which to articulate and contest norms of speed, ranges of motion, and forms of access. I have also begun work on a second project that traces the circulation of African American spirituals in Germany from the 1870s onward. My research on both of these projects has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).