Greetings! I am doctoral candidate in American Religions and Mellon Fellow in Comparative Race and Diaspora at Northwestern University. My research and teaching is situated at the intersections of religion, race, and empire in the hemispheric Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My dissertation project,  The Age of Plastic(s): Race, Religion, Ecology and the Biopolitics of Conversion investigates the science of conversion for late 19^th and early 20^th century Protestant missions who utilized the racialized grammar of “plastic/plasticity” to signify the possibility and prerogative of Protestant Empires to convert the newly “moldable” populations of the world. Moving through three case studies–U.S. settler colonialism, antiblackness, and the racialization of Islam–I articulate the “age of plastic” as a biopolitical grammar that appeared in a number of colonial geographies where Christian empire sought not merely to “exclude” racialized populations but to disintegrate, mold and re-shape. Intervening in the science of race and religion, I show how racial manipulability discourses operated on the level of a Christian biopolitics of life that was directly imbricated in environmental infrastructures of imperialism. Read more about my research here.

My research and teaching is intentionally transdisciplinary. While I am trained in Religious Studies and Critical Race/Ethnic Studies, I also devote substantive attention to history, gender/sexuality, science and technology, secularism, space and movement, Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, and the environmental humanities. I pursue this constellation across fields and disciplines as part of a broader inquiry into “the human”—its colonial politics of signification, and the logics, languages, and performances that enable and foreclose otherwise modes of being and relating in the world.

Before coming to Northwestern, I earned a Masters degree from Princeton Seminary and a Bachelors from Anderson University. My adviser is Sylvester Johnson.