She is a feminist ethnographer who studies the intersection of race, place and nation. She brings an anthropological lens to bear on place and space, local identities and global imaginaries, and diaspora and empire, showing how these variously illuminate the lived experience of Blackness. She is the author of Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black Liverpool. Her essays have appeared in Social Text, Antipode, American Ethnologist, and Cultural Anthropology, as well as in edited volumes on Race and Globalization and Black Europe. Her current book project studies the fraught racial politics underlying New York identity.