She earned BAs in history and studio art from Rice University and a PhD in U.S. women’s and gender history from Rutgers University. Her first monograph, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle was published in May 2018, by UNC Press. She has also published a book chapter in the edited collection U.S. Women’s History: Untangling the Threads of Sisterhood (Rutgers University Press, 2017), an article in the Journal of Women's History, and has an article forthcoming in The History Teacher. She is the winner of a 2016 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, a 2015 Moody Foundation grant to research at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and two Mississippi Humanities Council grants.