Her research and teaching interests include African American History, Women’s History, the history of black entrepreneurship, fashion and beauty studies and travel and migration throughout the African Diaspora. A graduate of Georgetown and Rutgers Universities, she is the author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (University of Illinois Press, 2010) which was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians. In addition, she has served as a subject editor for African American National Biography, and has had her work published and reprinted in several journals and edited volumes. Currently, Professor Gill is working on a book manuscript on the promise and peril of African American international leisure travel since WWI.