Areas of Research / Teaching Interests:

Twentieth-century American literature 

African American literature and history

 Black Atlantic and Diasporic Studies

Twentieth-century British Literature

Postcolonial literature and theory

 Race and Ethnicity Studies

 Southern Studies

 Popular Culture Studies

 Gender and Women’s Studies

I am a Gulf South scholar emphasizing folklore as an integral part of my research.  I continuously return to expressions of material culture in my research. In literature, I analyze these expressions as symbolic. Concerning actual cultural practices, I seek to understand them through the lens of community and meaning-making as a vital part of the human experience.  Further, I believe engaging the particularities of Gulf South culture is necessary as this region and its residents exist in a state of precarity due to climate and economic forces. All of the following projects feature an interest in Blackness and the various unique locations, be they geographic or digital, that provide a rich analysis for a nuanced analysis of identity. 

I have published two essays, “The Politics of the Plate: Food and Southern Culture in Ernest J. Gaines Of Love and Dust” in the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany and “Mothering the Storm: Black Girlhood and Communal Care in Literature of Katrina” in Wait Five Minutes: Weatherlore in the Twenty-First Century” which were chapters in my dissertation. These essays extend the work established in Thadious Davis’s Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature by presenting the Gulf South as a specific geographic space.  Although this space is not articulated in Davis’s text, these essays build on the structure provided by Southscapes to attend to the specifics of Black Southern cultures. Through critical literary analysis of Ernest Gaines, Kiese Laymon, and Jessmyn Ward, these publications use a framework that attends to the specifics of culture in place to de-essentialize Blackness as both an experience and a literary perspective. This lens allows for readings that address the nuances of the experiences living near an area plagued with the generation-defining ecological and economic disasters like Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina and Deepwater Horizon while addressing what Houston Baker calls the “non-biodegradable, doggedly irresolvable issue of race.” 

Along with two other colleagues, I am currently editing The No Limit Reader: Music, Place, and Space in the Dirty South. This reader will feature a collection of essays inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit of Percy Miller’s No Limit Records while also recognizing the cultural influence of Louisiana and its musical traditions that extend well beyond the borders of New Orleans.  This collection will also feature my essay, “Haterz: Examining the Tensions Underlying a Carnival Anthem” which explores the sonic musical integration and cultural rescripting of Black Louisiana identity through a regional popular hit’s influence on folk culture. 

Currently, I am developing two conference presentations into articles. This November, I presented at the American Folklore Society’s National Conference. My presentation, “John Weatherall and the Reconstruction of Acadiana’s Rural Mardi Gras,” discusses how Acadiana Mardi Gras has undergone an interesting evolution. Traditionally, this version of the celebration has been more rural and culturally “Cajun” as opposed to the more popular and chaotic version in New Orleans. However, due to one man’s camera, John Weatherall, and the rise of social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, Acadiana’s Mardi Gras celebration has become an interesting spectacle of cultural mediation. Weatherall, a cameraman for the local news, has become an amateur folklorist, with documentation of a Mardi Gras celebration that appears to be a more culturally, racially, and queer-friendly spectacle. I plan to submit this article to the Mississippi Quarterly or Western Folklore by the end of the Spring semester. 

The second article is an extension of a presentation given this summer at The Society for the Study of Southern Literature conference titled, “Tenderheaded: Folklore, Memory, and Hair as a Site of Struggle in Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House.” I argue that Sarah M. Broom’s memoir, The Yellow House, joins this tradition of engaging hairlore to construct an intimate portrayal of the ways Black New Orleanians are haunted by the legacy of slavery and white supremacy as they try to access the American Dream through home ownership. The memoir chronicles the geographic vulnerability of New Orleans East residents due to redlining, climate disasters, and economic disparities. However, the memoir relies on the narrative construction of folk belief to elaborate on what Katherine McKittrick describes in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and The Cartographies of Struggle, as black women geographies that “push up against the seemingly natural spaces and places of subjugation…the sites/citations of struggle indicate that traditional geographies, and their attendant hierarchical categories of humanness, cannot do the emancipatory work some subjects demand” (xix).  After completing this article, I plan to submit this to Calloloo or African American Review by early Spring.  These two articles extend my research into how black southern writers articulate a black subjectivity that navigates the specific political, social, and cultural concerns of the Gulf South. 

In my next project, I am composing a book proposal that continues my interest in Folklore studies and Black Southern culture, particularly of the Gulf South. Black in Acadiana: Cultural Workers and Identity Formation in Cajun Country will explore the interplay of Black, Indigenous, French and Spanish influences on Black identity in the idiosyncratic and unique region of Louisiana known as Acadiana. Primarily characterized as a region culturally dominated by Cajun and sometimes Creole cultures, Black cultural influences often are marginalized or outright erased. This project seeks to illuminate the ways that Black culture has heavily influenced and shaped some of the most prominent and popular characteristics of the region without much acknowledgment. My archive will be ethnographic research, historical documents, and media texts. This project will be a critical exploration of the dynamics of cultural dominance and submission in the formation of identity by highlighting the work and voices of the “cultural workers:” musicians, cooks, designers, artists, historians. My timeline for this project is to complete a book proposal by the Spring of 2025. I anticipate that this project will take about three years to complete.

For a future book project, I will explore the ways that Black women use hairlore and storytelling as a means of articulating the specifics of their experiences. Author Pearl Cleage once said in her spoken word performance, Hairpeace, “You can’t be a Black woman writer in America and not talk about hair.” Cleage articulates the collective understanding among Black women that hair is such an integral aspect of their lived experiences that it is virtually impossible to disentangle its importance in every aspect of existence. This is especially true when it comes to creativity, as many Black women writers have written implicitly and explicitly about the folklore surrounding Black hair. This project will extend the work I am currently doing on Sarah Broome’s memoir, as well as including ethnography that I completed in my Master’s thesis, Black Women’s Hair Traditions in South Louisiana. I have developed a course, Black Hair Narratives for the English department, that features the framework and some of the texts that I plan to use in this project. In addition, I am currently supervising and mentoring a Mellon fellow at Xavier who is conducting his own research based on coursework in Black Hair Narratives.