She is a scholar-artist who merges her life as a musician and vocalist with her interdisciplinary specializations in religion, gender, race, music, popular culture, and ethnographic methods. Her book Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women will soon be published by Duke University Press, and she is now at work on a book about how film and contemporary media influence mass interpretations of the black female body. Her creative endeavors have earned grants from the Ford Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. At Williams she teaches courses on research methods and ethnographic approaches to Africana studies, race and gender, and womanist/black feminist thought. She received an A.B. from Duke University, and an M.Div. and Ph.D. from Emory University.