Before that she was a Visiting Professor of History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her University of Washington dissertation examined gendered discourses in early 20th century NAACP activism. She has also written extensively on 19th Century African Americans in California. She has published articles in California History among other journals. Her article “’Anxious Foot Soldiers’: Sacramento’s Black Women and Education in Nineteenth-Century California” appeared in Quintard Taylor and Shirley Moore, eds., African American Women Confront the West, 1600-2000 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003).