I earned a B.A. (Summa cum Laude) from Columbus State University and M.A. and Ph.D. from Emory University. I I have published scores of peer-reviewed journal essays and book chapters on African American Literature.  My recent books are African American Literature in Transition, 1880-1900, co-edited with Caroline Gebhard (Cambridge UP, 2026) and The Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters, edited with Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Narain (Edinburgh UP, 2026).  My other books are The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford: Transatlantic Reformer and Race Man, co-authored by Sidonia Serafini with Rev. Paul Walker, Highgate Baptist Church, Birmingham, UK (UGA Press, 2020; paperback reprint 2024); a single-authored study titled Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (UGA Press, 2015); Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 (NYU Press, 2006), o-edited with Caroline Gebhard; a teaching edition of the 1860 memoir Running 1,000 Miles for Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (UGA Press, 1999); and a collection of essays, co-edited with Suzanne Miller, titled Multicultural Literature and Literacies: Making Space for Difference (SUNY Press Series on Literature, Culture, and Learning, 1993). 

 

Throughout my career I have also been engaged in externally funded Public Humanities projects. I am currently co-P.I. with Dr. Nicholas Allen for the cross-institutional, multidisciplinary Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I was a Co-Principal Investigator for the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative (CRDL), initially funded by a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  We earned a regional Emmy@ for the two-hour documentary How We Got Over (2009), hosted by Andrew Young, former U.N. Ambassador and Mayor of Atlanta.  In 2010 we earned a national award, the Helen and Martin Schwartz Prize for Public Humanities Programs, and in 2011, an Award for Excellence in Research Using the Holdings of an Archives from the Georgia Historical Records Advisory Board.  With Professor Layli Phillips Maparyan I co-founded and co-edited Womanist Theory and Research, formerly The Womanist, which was supported by a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, along with a three-year summer program to support faculty research.  

 

I am the recipient of the Karen Dandurand Lifetime Achievement Award (for mentorship, scholarship, teaching, and service) from the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (2025) and the Lorraine A. Williams Leadership Award from the Association of Black Women Historians (2019).