1. As your publications and courses at BC reflect, you focus primarily on race, gender, sexuality, and medicine in African American history and African Diaspora studies. What spurred your interest in researching and teaching about these subjects?

I developed an interest in studying gender and sexuality while I was in graduate school. One of the earliest courses I took was a course on Women in U.S. History. To be honest, I took it because it fit my schedule and not necessarily because I had a deep interest in the subject matter. But the professors who were co-teaching the course made the topic incredibly interesting. The next year I took a course on Race and Sex in America, which was taught by a prominent scholar in African American women’s history. Taking that class with Professor Deborah Gray White really set me on my path to writing a dissertation on black middle-class masculinity in the early twentieth century, which later became my first book. I actually kind of stumbled into studying the history of medicine. After setting out to write a second book on black men and state institutions (including hospitals), I discovered some fascinating archival records of a federal insane asylum in Washington, DC. Once I realized that there was not a large body of historical scholarship on race and mental illness, I decided to write a book on African American patients at the hospital.

2. You have recently been a moderator for the Lowell Humanities Series event for Carol Anderson on "One Person, No Vote," and been on a panel discussion for “BLM at BC: Formation and Justice in Higher Education" with Professor Régine Jean-Charles and Professor Shawn McGuffey. As a History professor, in what ways do you see change happening on BC's campus to reflect the current social climate in the U.S.?

There’s been a lot of important programming on campus with respect to the racial reckoning that is currently going on in the US, which is great. And the Boston College Forum on Racial Justice in America is very promising and I applaud the steps that Fr. Leahy and the administration have taken in this regard. But there needs to be institutionalization of these good faith efforts to address racism at the university, national, and international level. One important step in this direction is university approval of the African and African Diaspora Studies major. The university’s support of more hiring in the AADS Program has also been important. Now I think that there needs to be a coordinated effort across the university to diversify the tenure-related faculty by hiring scholars from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (excluding international scholars). As I mentioned in the panel with Professors Jean-Charles and McGuffey, if there were departments at BC that had one or two female faculty members and two or three dozen male faculty members, we would find that intolerable. I think it is a problem that we have so many departments that have such skewed ratios of white to non-white faculty.

3. In what ways do you see your courses or other courses in the History Department playing a role in informing students’ perceptions of race and race relations in our country?

Most of the courses that I teach deal with race at some level. My History of Medicine and Public Health in the African Diaspora course, for instance, exposes students to how knowledge about disease and therapeutic and public health interventions have been shaped by ideas about racial difference. My Gender and and Sexuality in African American History course gets students to think about the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality in producing social hierarchies and in resistance to those social hierarchies. I’m particularly proud of a core course that I designed with my colleague Professor Priya Lal: African Diaspora and the World I and II. We developed this course to meet student demand, particularly from black students, to see the histories of African-descended people reflected in the university core curriculum. I’m also proud of many of my colleagues, who, in the wake of the police killings of unarmed black people this past summer, have stepped up and integrated readings about race and racism into their courses that ostensibly have little to do with antiblack racism in the US.

4. Do you have any publications in the works at the moment? Or is there something in mind that you would like to accomplish?

I’m currently doing research for another book project on African American mental health and social policy in twentieth-century urban America. I’m hoping to publish an article about a community mental health clinic in a predominantly black neighborhood in civil-rights-era Chicago in a history journal in 2021.

5. And lastly, is there a fun new hobby or activity that you were able to take up during quarantine?

I didn’t have a lot of hobbies before the pandemic to begin with. I do like to run, spend time with friends, and bake. I continue to run (with a proper face covering!) and spend time with friends (both outside and on Zoom). I resisted stepping up my baking however, out of fear of making those extra quarantine pounds permanent.