Williams' research and interests include the history and theory of dance and theater, dance in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, performance, book history, and narrative theory, dance and theories of rights and race, and choreographic embodiments of lyric verse. Williams is currently working on “Virtual Motion: Dance and Mobility in Early Modern English Literature,” which studies the use of dance both to embody and to figure processes of political upheaval in which patterns of motion and migration predominate. He has received fellowships from Columbia University's Heyman Center for the Humanities and from New York University's Center for Ballet and the Arts. Williams has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University.