Her research focuses on the experiences of black people in British and French North America in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her first book, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (NYU Press, 2016), examines how the business of slavery—the buying and selling of people, food, and goods—shaped the experience of slavery, the process of emancipation, and the realities of black freedom in Rhode Island from the colonial period through the American Civil War. Her current book project, From Slavery to Suffrage: Black on the Wisconsin Frontier, 1740 to 1866, will examine how the practice of race-based slavery, black settlement, and debates over abolition and black rights shaped white-black race relations in the Midwest.