I fell in love with history when my father gifted me a book about African American history. With a simple but thoughtful gesture, he inspired me to delve deeper into the past in search of stories about ordinary people who made extraordinary decisions, becoming a part of history. I soon discovered my passion for history, teaching, mentoring, and sharing stories about the past with the broader public. 

I attended Miami University of Ohio where I received my training in Black Studies and continued my journey into academia when I enrolled in a graduate program at Columbia University to study African American studies with my late mentor Dr. Manning Marable. Working with Dr. Marable solidified my interest in the historical profession and I completed my doctoral degree in history at the University of Virginia under the guidance of Elizabeth Varon, Thavolia Glymph, and Gary Gallagher. 

I began my career as an educator and researcher at Oberlin College and Conservatory where I spent six years working with engaged students and wonderful colleagues. In 2021, I accepted a position at Cornell University where I am currently associate professor of history and the Sandler Family Faculty Fellow in American Studies. During my time at Oberlin and Cornell, I’ve designed and offered a dozen courses that cover a range of topics including slavery in the United States, Civil War and Reconstruction, African American women’s intellectual history, and historical methods. 

My first book, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) reveals how African American women—enslaved, fugitive, and free—imagined new identities and lives beyond the oppressive restrictions intended to prevent them from experiencing liberty, self-respect, and power. Consulting nineteenth-century newspapers, government documents, letters, abolitionist records, legislation, and memoirs, I trace how black women navigated social and legal proscriptions to develop their own ideas about liberty as they escaped from slavery, initiated freedom suits, created entrepreneurial economies, pursued education, and participated in political work. In telling these stories, I locate black women at the vanguard of the history of Washington D.C., and illuminate how they contributed to the momentous transformations of nineteenth-century America. This book was named the 2021 Letitia Woods Brown Book prize winner for best book in African American women's history, the 2021 Pauli Murray Book prize winner for best book in Black intellectual history and the 2021 Mary Kelley prize winner for best book published in women, gender, or sexuality in the early American Republic .

My second book, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime, and Clemency in Early Virginia, 1662-1865 is published with the University of North Carolina Press. This book examines clemency in legal cases that involve enslaved women accused of capital crime in early Virginia. In these legal encounters, we not only see a system that worked to define and affirm a commitment to legal paternalism that upheld the rule of law, but decades of responses made by the countless enslaved women accused of capital offenses. The Demands of Justice examines how these responses constituted the makings of an intellectual history of enslaved women’s articulations of justice. I have published articles and reviews in The Journal of Southern History, The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of  Women's History, the Journal of American Legal History and the Journal of the Civil War Era.

In addition to being a lifetime member of the Association of Black Women Historians, I serve on the editorial board of Civil War History, The Journal of Southern History, and the Journal of the Civil War Era. I also served on committees for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the Southern Historical Association. 

My work has been supported by the Andrew Mellon and Woodrow Wilson foundations as well as the American Association of University Women and the Bright Institute Fellowship. In 2023, I was named the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Library of Congress.