I am a historian of transnational culture, media, and Black internationalism in the twentieth century. My research examines the reproduction of race and culture across national borders, with a particular focus on the role of Black producers in shaping the global popularity and political power of African American culture.

My first book, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021) tracks the production and distribution of various forms of African American music (including jazz, spirituals, gospel, and the blues) in France and the Francophone world after World War II. By showing how the popularity of African American music was intertwined with contemporary structures of racism and imperialism, the book demonstrates this music's centrality to postwar France and the convergence of decolonization, the expanding globalized economy, the Cold War, and worldwide liberation movements. In 2022, it was awarded the Gilbert Chinard Book Prize by the Society for French Historical Studies, named best history in the category of Historical Research in Recorded Jazz by the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and short-listed for the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. In 2023, it was awarded the Woody Guthrie First Book Award by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-US Branch.

As associate professor of history at Hamilton College in Clinton, NY, I teach courses on a range of topics in US and African diasporic histories, including the histories of race and migration, sound and radio, media and citizenship, US empire, the Black freedom struggle, and Black internationalism in Paris and beyond. My teaching seeks to balance an understanding of structural inequality, racism, and empire with a focused inquiry into how these transformed lived experiences (and the lives of material objects) in the United States and elsewhere.

Recent Publications

  • Soundscapes of Liberation

    My first book, Soundscapes of Liberation: African American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press, 2021) traces the popularization of African American music in postwar France, where it signaled new forms of power and protest.

  • William Greaves and Lou House on set of Black Journal

    Producing a Black World

    This article on Black Journal’s internationalist and Pan-African politics was included in a special issue on the history of Black internationalism in the Journal of African American History (November 2021).

  • Ray Charles in Paris

    My article in the June 2019 issue of American Quarterly examined a concert seres by Ray Charles in Paris in October 1961, and its convergence with the Algerian War.

  • Edited Volume on William Greaves

    My contribution to the first edited volume on the filmmaker and producer William Greaves focused on Greaves’s internationalist perspective and its influence on the television program Black Journal.

  • Pedagogies of Black Internationalism

    My contribution to the first edited volume of the African American Intellectual History Society considered the diasporic and Black internationalist pedagogical strategies employed by French language educators at HBCUs in the 1930s and 1940s.

  • First Festival of Black Arts (1966)

    I contributed an essay on African American music to an edited volume, Le 1er festival mondial des arts nègres: Mémoire et Actualité (Dakar: Harmattan Senegal, 2020), on the First Festival of Black Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966.