After graduating summa cum laude from Morehouse College, he pursued his doctoral studies at the University of California, Riverside. While working on his dissertation, he spent a year of research at the University of Ghana. Formerly a postdoctoral fellow at the Woodson Institute, he has also held fellowships at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of California, Riverside. Before taking his current academic position at Colorado State, he was on the faculty of the University of Memphis. He has authored numerous articles and book chapters, and recently published a book-length study titled Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650–1850 (NYU Press, 2010).