My work spans two broad fields of inquiry. The first is gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, and twentieth-century fiction (with a focus on Virginia Woolf). The second is race, cultural studies, and visuality. I recently completed Signs of the Times: The Visual Politics of Jim Crow, which charts the cultural history of segregation signs through their mediation by photography. My current project explores the afterlives of Virginia Woolf in unexpected places and cultural traditions across the twentieth century: not the popular cultural appropriations that have generated explicit revisions of her novels and emblazoned her image on coffee mugs and t-shirts, but the subtle resonances and subtextual conversations that are audible in writers as diverse as Nella Larsen, Roland Barthes, and W.G. Sebald.
Woolf Tracks: Remapping Modernist Genealogies (a study of subtextual engagements with Woolf across the twentieth century); "Bright Radiance" (on photography as "light-writing," psychoanalytic accounts of mania, and maternal elegies); “As a reader of Virginia Woolf”: W.G. Sebald’s Modernist Legacies" (for inclusion in a volume on "Contemporary Revolutions"); "'Be English if you want': Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf" (on echoes of Woolf in the Harlem Renaissance).
