I am Associate Professor of English Literature and African American Studies, director of the Lee Hagan Africana Studies Center, and Coordinator of the Program in African and African American Studies at New Jersey City University. I am currently completing work on my book project, “Irreconcilable Differences?: Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora,” which examines African American and Black European autobiographical narratives, music, and performance. My research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first century African American and African Diasporic literature, with a focus on Black German Studies, Black autobiography, speculative fiction, visual cultures, music, and digital humanities.
My digital humanities project, Singing the Nation, is a curated collection of video performances and mashups of James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (1900), also popularly known as the “Negro National Anthem” and the “Black National Anthem.”