I work in several areas of modern and contemporary American Studies, including cultural and intellectual history, Cinema and Media Studies, African American Studies, US Southern Studies and the Global South, and creative nonfiction.  This broad range of interests led me to study literature and film at New York University and, subsequently, history at the University of Virginia.  As a result, my interdisciplinary scholarship is grounded in multiple fields and seeks to make connections among disparate traditions and methods.

My work in American literature led to an early book, Seeking the Region in American Literature and Culture: Modernity, Dissidence, Innovation (2005), that considers the sometimes-paradoxical processes in which fiction writers including Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Toni Morrison could emerge from such distinctively “regional” backgrounds and become celebrated representatives of a national or “American” literary tradition.  A more expansively interdisciplinary book followed: Fade In, Crossroads: A History of the Southern Cinema (2017) tells the story of the relationships between southerners and motion pictures from the silent era through the golden age of Hollywood, considering everything from the migratory patterns of southerners to the evolution of specific film genres and practices—from Hollywood musicals to the independent “race film” industry—to the contributions of southern mores and prejudices in the proliferation of film regulation and censorship.  As a work of history, Fade In, Crossroads reveals the profound consequences of the coincidence of the rise and fall of the American film industry with the rise and fall of the South’s most important modern product and export: Jim Crow segregation.  Most recently, I co-edited Jim Crow Modernism (2026), a collection of essays taking as its starting point the contemporaneity of the Jim Crow era and the modernist era in art and culture, and exploring how these phenomena informed one another, and how artists and thinkers on both sides of the color line worked in and against the “separate but equal” landscape and the organizing logic of Jim Crow.  My current book project is focused on the relationship between writer and activist James Baldwin and US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the early 1960s, and the implications of their simultaneously hopeful and skeptical encounters for the immediate course of the Civil Rights Movement as well as the long-term prospects for Americans’ hopes for more just and equitable futures.

My interests in the US South are varied, stretching from literary and cinematic traditions to such areas as law, politics, education, labor, sports, food, technology, and environment. For many years I have looked for opportunities to contribute to a closer integration of African American Studies and Southern Studies, an effort that has resulted in considerable teaching and publishing across the history of Jim Crow, the Black freedom struggle, and contemporary topics addressing race and region.  I recently served a term (2024-26) as President of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature, during which I worked with the Society’s program committee and officials at Fisk University to bring the Society’s biennial conference to Fisk, which marked the first time in its nearly sixty-year history that the organization’s conference took place at an Historically Black College/University (HBCU).  I am also deeply interested in historical processes of human migration, both internally within the US and internationally.  This interest has given my work on the South another dimension, as, especially in the twentieth century, the migration of millions of southerners to other parts of the country, and from rural to urban and suburban areas within the South, has created complex, durable networks of travel, communication, exchange, and cultural production.  My work on such figures as James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, both northern-born African Americans with southern-born parents and evolving relationships to southern history and life during and after the Jim Crow period, has sought to understand more about the roles of migration and mobility in the networking of the modern world.

I welcome queries from current and prospective students eager to learn more about these and related areas. It has long been a privilege to work with excellent graduate students, whose research has led to their own diverse, accomplished careers in and beyond the academy.  And I encourage undergraduate students to come and discuss their emerging intellectual interests with me as well.  I have spent a considerable part of my career focused on such matters as academic freedom and responsibility, shared governance, university service and public outreach, and I am always happy to talk about these and related elements in the health of the academy and those it serves.  I know how important my own teachers have been in my life; and I value the opportunity to provide some of the same guidance in my work with students.