She researches and teaches in the areas of visual culture and media studies, black cultural studies, ethnography, gender theory, and culture and technology studies. Her articles appear in African American Review,American Quarterly, Callaloo: Art and Culture in the African Diaspora, Public Culture, Signs, Social Text, tdr: the journal of performance studies, and edited anthologies. Her book Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011) is the recipient of the 2012 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize of the American Studies Association. She is also the author of On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (Rutgers University Press, 2015).