I am Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Florida State University (FSU), the Co-Founder and Associate Director of Front Porch Research Strategy in New Orleans, and a Co-Founder of the Tallahassee Bail Fund. I am also a member of the 2022–2024 Young Scholars in American Religion cohort. I earned my Ph.D. in North American Religions from Columbia University, my M.T.S. in Islamic Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and my B.A. in Religion and Peace & Conflict Studies from Haverford College. Prior to joining the FSU faculty, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Dartmouth College.

In my time thus far at FSU, I have launched a community-directed research program on religion, race, gender, and abolition geographies, with a particular focus on the American South and Gulf Coast. My work is deeply interdisciplinary, bridging the fields of Geography, Anthropology, History, Queer Studies, Black Studies, and American Studies. It is also deeply collaborative. My research, teaching, and mentorship grow from and are accountable to the decades-long relationships I have forged with southern organizers working on the frontlines of our country’s movements for prison abolition, climate justice, and health equity. Together, we work in partnership to theorize the operation of racial capitalism in our daily lives, and to explore how we can dream beyond what is to build together what must be. Doing so requires attending to the often-contradictory roles of religion in our worlds, be that as a force for expanding the violence that fills our present, or as a resource for building the world otherwise. These are precisely the grounded lessons I bring to bear in my undergraduate and graduate classrooms, for which I was recognized with a 2021–2022 University Teaching Award for Community Engaged Teaching.

Co-thinking and co-creating scholarship in these ways has fueled a breadth of intersecting and interlocking research interests. My first book project, Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2023), is a social movement ethnography collectively-authored with my longtime research partners at Women With A Vision in New Orleans. Fire Dreams blends social history, religious studies, and Black feminist theory to tell the story of southern Black women’s major contributions to harm reduction, mutual aid, reproductive justice, and abolition feminism. In the summer of 2022, I began work on a new project co-dreamed with my colleagues Elayne Oliphant and Daniel Vaca called “Creating the World Anew: Religion, Economy, and Mutual Aid.” Through this project, we aim to open a committed space of practice and study for exploring the role of religion in building worlds and economies beyond the violence of racial capitalism in our present. This project will serve as a springboard for growing my second book project, Moral Medicine, which partners with formerly incarcerated women organizers to excavate the histories of gendered criminalization and abolition feminism in the South today.

My research has been supported by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars’ Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, the Institute for Religion, Culture, & Public Life, the Dartmouth College Venture Fund, Florida State University’s Council on Research and Creativity, and the Robert B. Bradley Library Research Grants. I also remain deeply enmeshed in the movements to end AIDS and abolish prisons in which I was raised more than twenty years ago. I am the co-founder of TEACH Outside, Prison Health News, and the Institute for Community Justice, as well as the convener of the national Religion and Abolition activist/academic forum. Currently, I serve as a Board Member to Transforming Reentry Services in Chicago, and Reconstruction Inc. in Philadelphia.