He also teaches in the programs of American Studies and Africana Studies. He has been a fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Virginia and a fellow for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program in Princeton, New Jersey. He has interests in American nationalism, immigration and mobility, black intellectual thought, and critical race theory. He has published on topics as varied as imprisonment and torture, black comedy, and race and politics in Kansas. His first book, Ghetto Images in Twentieth Century American Literature (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012), explores how six American writers imagine and fictionalize the experience of ghettoization. He is currently working on a project that looks at black autobiography and the politics of confessional storytelling. He is entering his eleventh year at Vassar.