I study literature, philosophy, and religion — how they converge, how they shape one another, how they fashion our sense of being modern. Methodological insights from black studies guide me in this research.
My literary focus is the “Harlem Renaissance,” viewed expansively as integral to transatlantic modernism. My philosophical writing centers on aesthetics and phenomenology, largely in German thinkers from Kant to Benjamin. My interest in religion ranges from the ancient Mediterranean to the contemporary Caribbean.
I am finishing a biography of the Jamaican writer Claude McKay for Yale University Press and preparing a new edition of Jean Toomer’s Cane for the Norton Library. I am also completing a study of the rich yet undervalued theological vein in the work of Zora Neale Hurston. These books reflect on questions of style — charm, revision, grace.