Photo of me taken by my uncle Melvin at Olayami Dabls' art environment in Detroit, MI.
I am a library worker, writer, and researcher with a PhD in US History. I split my time between Charlottesville, VA (Monacan land) and metro-Detroit (Anishinaabe land), and am inspired by the sounds, landscape, buildings, history, and people of Detroit, Appalachia, and other wild, weird, wonderful places.
My academic interests intersect urban history, cultural history, social movement history, and digital and public humanities. My dissertation "Building Bohemia in Detroit's Cass Corridor, 1964-2017," explores the influential art and activism that emerged from the Cass Corridor neighborhood in the late twentieth century, as well as the community's later erasure, and is available open access.
I also have an MA in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi. My thesis on the Oxford, MS-based Fat Possum Records situated the record label's marketing practices in a lineage of tactics used to sell blues to white audiences throughout the twentieth century.