I am an interdisciplinary scholar of African American literature and legal studies/legal history from the 19th century to the present. My research foregrounds Black expression that emerges at or in response to the intersection of art and legal culture—which is to say, the ways that Black writers not only 1) narrate their relationship to the legal structures and institutions with which they interact, but also 2) engage in worldmaking practices that renovate and reimagine those legal structures. To this end, my work often disrupts or unsettles taxonomies of both “law” and “literature” by situating their objects of inquiry in unexpected ways—for instance by reading legal texts as fiction and/or reading literary fiction as works of legal practice and worldmaking. I hope to deepen our understanding of the entangled relationship between these two modes of discourse by using Black Studies methodologies to more fully explore the forms of legal imagination engaged as freedom practice by Black artists, while remaining sensitive to the ways that legal culture has historically enshrined and facilitated anti-Blackness. My first book, Black Pro Se: Authorship and the Limits of Law in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (UNC Press, 2025), examines antebellum African American literature that mobilizes specific legal forms and strategies that frame the book’s four chapters: appeal, confession, jurisdiction, and precedent. In reading Black writers as architects of legal possibility, Black Pro Se plays on the coincidental intimacy of “prose” and the legal term pro se, which refers to litigants who represent themselves in legal proceedings. The book draws on primary sources across multiple genres—shorts stories and novels, slave narratives, speeches, criminal confessions, periodicals, and pamphlets—and reads them alongside intertexts from legal history, including trial transcripts, judicial opinions, and statutes. My research has also appeared or is forthcoming in MELUS, Law, Culture & Humanities, African American Review, and the European Journal of English Studies. I am currently working on a second monograph that takes up tort law and Black literary theories of redress and repair that unsettle legal fictions of "wholeness."