As a scholar, my thinking is guided by a strong commitment to advancing the intersectional and interdisciplinary study of race, sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and culture through research, teaching, and service. My areas of research specialization include black feminisms, black sexualities, sex work studies, queer of color critique, and US West studies. 

My book, Disreputable Women: Black Sex Economies and the Making of San Diego is forthcoming with the University of California Press (2024). Disreputable Women is a deeply transdisciplinary study on how black women use sex work and place-making to claim economic, bodily and sexual autonomy in a militarized city that is intent on displacing and caging them. I distill the production of disreputable women–during two major 20th century urban development processes in downtown San Diego– where municipal police, public health officials, and even activists targeted street-involved sex-workers and the places they congregated as blight. I document how some black women responded with place-based critiques that took the form of reconceptualizing the public and private spheres by using residential hotels and multi-use commercial spaces for housing and work, controlling their erotic economies and their sexual-cultural lives. In Disreputable Women, I mark how discrete and explicit intellectual-economic-political practices by black women complicate a dominant understanding of redlight and tenderloin areas and black sex work, as just undesirable contaminators who must be “cleaned-out.” Instead, my intuitive framework of “disreputability” offers a more ethical and workable approach to imagining the built environment and its inhabitants–offering a rich and robust grammar for understanding black women’s lives in the scene of militarization and gendered anti-blackness.