The focus of her research is African-American literature, culture, and intellectual history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a literary historian, her work is committed to using archival materials to map those invisible or overlooked aspects of African American print culture and intellectual history. She is the author of Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Duke University Press, 2002), which chronicles the reading practices and organized literary associations of African Americans between 1830 and 1940. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript entitled “Remaking Negro Literature: Writing, Literary Practice, and African American Authorship, 1895-1910,” a project that seeks to make visible how literature was envisioned and transformed in the transitional years between two centuries.