Biography

I am an historian of film, mass media, race, and African American history. My first book, Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life, is a history of early African American cinema from the 1890s to the 1930s. In the late nineteenth century, an era marked by mass migration and Jim Crow segregation, African Americans were pioneers of American cinema. They produced and exhibited their own motion pictures, often transforming black churches into motion picture theaters during off hours. These film exhibitions raised money for black institutions, created shared social experiences, and broadcast ideas about racial uplift. As African Americans integrated the moving pictures into their aspirations for black progress, a vibrant black cinema culture developed across the pathways of turn-of-the-century migration. These developments informed the first mass black protest movement of the twentieth century, which politicized the demand for visual self-representation and articulated the belief that mischaracterizations in film constituted “civil death” and a violation of “natural rights.”

Selected Awards

• “Best Film Books of 2015,” Huffington Post, 2015
• Winner, Vincent P. DeSantis Best First Book Prize, Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2015
• Finalist, Jane Jacobs Urban Communication Book Prize, 2015
• “27 Great Books You Should’ve Heard About” Annual List, Slate, 2015

Research Interests

• African American History
• Diaspora and Race
• Film, Media and Popular Culture
• Built Environment
• Religion

Publication Highlights

• Envisioning Freedom: Cinema and the Building of Modern Black Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014).
  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674368057
• “Put Together to Please a Colored Audience”: Black Churches, Motion Pictures, and Migration at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Journal of American History, December 2014.