I am a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies. I have research and teaching expertise in the sociology of race, urban sociology, political sociology, indigeneity and settler colonialism, postcolonial sociology, criminology, and Du Boisian sociology. My research examines the racial and colonial politics of urban redevelopment and how antiracist and decolonial politics challenge enduring urban inequalities 

My dissertation, "Displacement and Dispossession:  Urban Renewal and Relocation in Postwar Chicago," is a comparative-historical study of how Urban Renewal projects and the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Urban Relocation policy impacted Black and Indigenous communities in postwar Chicago. I am also working on a research project that examines the connections between W.E.B. Du Bois’s urban and decolonial theories,  and a collaborative project on the racial, colonial, and gender politics of property and policing manifested in struggles over monuments.

My work has been published in Social Problems  and Sociology Compass. My research has been funded by the American Sociological Association, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the UMass Amherst Graduate School.

Before my doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I  received my M.A. in Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University and B.A. in Public Health Policy at the University of California, Irvine.