He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. His publications include essays on Henry James and Ida B. Wells and a book about the intersection of race and emergent U.S. consumer culture entitled Commerce in Color (University of Michigan Press, 2007). He is on the executive board of the Brooklyn College Center for Teaching and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Teacher. As a Leon Levy fellow he worked on a meditation on the life and work of Eric Walrond, a fiction writer and journalist born in Guyana and raised in Barbados and Panama, who rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance before moving to England. His book Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean was published by Columbia University Press in 2015.