He is working on a project tentatively titled "Slaves and Soldiers in the Red and Black Atlantic: A Transnational and Revolutionary History of the American Civil War." He earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in 1998 and has published numerous books including "Cotton Booms, Cotton Busts, and the Civil War in West Africa," "Primitive Art, Primitive Accumulation, and the Origin of the Work of Art in German New Guinea," and "Three Logics of Race: Theory and Exception in the Transnational History of Empire."