I am an Assistant Professor of African American History at the University of Vermont. I received my doctorate in African American and Women’s History from Rutgers University – New Brunswick. I have an M.A. in history from the University of New Orleans and a B.A. from the University of Tennessee –Knoxville. The grandchild and daughter of rural Mississippians, I was led to study history by asking questions about the origins of the fabric scraps in my grandmother’s apron. Broadly, my work examines motherhood, race, activism, benevolence, ideas about the “South,” epistolary writing and political consciousness in 1960s-era social movement networks. I am currently working on a book titled Signed, Sealed, Delivered: How Black and White Mothers used the Box Project and the Postal System to Fight Hunger and Feed the Mississippi Freedom Movement, which is under contract with the University of North Caroline Press. Signed, Sealed, Delivered tells a new and illuminating story of ordinary Black and white women’s overlooked participation in the modern Civil Rights Movement using one of the nation’s largest federal agencies: the U.S. Postal System.

My article on Mississippi mothers, the welfare state, and the postal system was published in a special edition of Gender & History in January 2023, and I have contributed co-written articles to all three volumes of the award-winning Scarlet & Black Project at Rutgers University. I am a 2023 recipient of the ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship and the 2023 NASEM Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship. My work has also been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the PEO Sisterhood and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

I teach classes on African American History, Black Women’s History, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement, and the U.S. South, and I hope to expand my teaching catalogue to include courses on African American leisure and recreation and the Black Outdoors (an exploration of Black Folks’ historic connection the land, nature and the environment).  In the fall, I will be teaching a course entitled “Almost Allies” which examines the contours of empathy, interracial activism, and fragile alliances in 19^th and 20^th century social movements.