Her research centers on ideologies and practices of race and its relationship to global structures of power in Africa and the African diaspora. She specializes in both African diaspora theory and critical race theory as well as on U.S. immigration politics. Her book Race Across the Atlantic: Postcolonial Africa and the Predicament of Blackness is an ethnographic study of the historical and contemporary cultural and political practices of race-making in urban Ghana, examining how people are shaped by and respond to local and global hierarchies of race and power. She was the 2009–2010 William S. Vaughn Visiting Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University.