Her research interests include the literary and visual representation of race, as well as performance, gender and sexuality studies. On academic leave for 2004-05, she is currently a Fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and also a Andrew W. Mellon Career Enhancement Fellow. She is completing a manuscript titled Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism in the Atlantic Diaspora and is the author of articles on W.E.B. Du Bois and dandyism in Callaloo and a chapter on the dandy and modernist aesthetics forthcoming in an edited volume titled Bad Modernisms.