Her research and teaching interests include race, inequality, internal migration, cultural sociology, and the U.S. South. She has published on these topics in Poetics, the Du Bois Review, Race and Social Problems, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is working on a book manuscript about the African American reverse migration to the South. The manuscript, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines the economic, social, and cultural experiences of blacks who were born and raised in the North and West and are now moving to the South. Work from this project has received awards from the Association of Black Sociologists and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.