About Me

I am a public and digital historian whose work explores African Diasporic placemaking and the stories communities tell about themselves across time, space, and media. I am based at the University of Maryland, where I lead work in digital and public humanities that bridges scholarship, teaching, and community partnership. My approach is rooted in collaboration, care, and sustainability, with a commitment to producing public-facing work that serves community needs while also advancing digital and public humanities practices that shape how history is made, shared, and contested in the present.

Across my projects, I invest in building infrastructure that helps people do meaningful public history work: networks, tools, training, and storytelling support. My interests include Black digital futures, community memory, ethical digital practice, and the ways digital methods can expand who gets to participate in historical interpretation. This commitment shapes my mentoring and curricular design, including hubs and “open notebook” resources that support students and partners as they develop research, storytelling, and public scholarship skills.

My key projects and leadership roles include directing the redesign for The Museum of the City (a virtual museum) and serving as Co-PI on the Mellon-funded Digital Ethnic Futures Consortium (DEFCon). Previously, I led the premier digital humanities initiative, CSUF Digital at California State University, Fullerton for nine years, including four years as the West Coast anchor of DEFCon. I also led the steering committee for the Digital Humanities Across the CSU network (DH@CSU), the first cross-institutional digital humanities initiative to bring together faculty, librarians, and administrators across the CSU system.

Alongside this field-building work, I have led major community-engaged initiatives such as the forthcoming Archiving Black OC, and I maintain close partnerships and ongoing collaborations with community-led cultural heritage organizations such as The Mary and Eliza Freeman Center for History and Community in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Lakeland Community Heritage Project in College Park, MD. My public humanities portfolio also includes projects that critically engage the public arts landscape, including Mapping Arts OC, and co-leading the more recent Humanities and Social Sciences mural project at CSUF, an installation of three vibrant murals by different artists depicting the humanities experience.

My research has received generous support from funders including the National Science Foundation’s Geography and Spatial Sciences Program, California Humanities, Connecticut Humanities, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in Fine Art, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), and several internal awards from California State University, Fullerton.

I welcome opportunities to collaborate with community organizations, cultural institutions, museums, educators, artists, and fellow researchers who are interested in community-engaged practices, public history, digital storytelling, and African Diasporic spatial humanities. Prospective graduate students are also encouraged to reach out via the contact information available through the University of Maryland’s Department of American Studies website, especially those excited by collaborative, public-facing research and ethical digital practice. If you are looking for a partner to co-develop a project, support a community archive, design public humanities programming, or imagine new digital platforms for shared history-making, please check out my latest adventure the Digital and Public Practice Lab, LLC.

DEGREES

Ph.D. Cultural Studies, June 2014, University of California, Davis

B.A., American Studies and English, May 2003, Tufts University, Medford, MA