She specializes in nineteenth-century African American history with an emphasis on slavery, race, and gender. At UNF, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, African American History, American Slavery, the American South, and the Making of Modern America. She currently serves as the 2017-2018 Race and Gender Postdoctoral Fellow at Rutgers University. Her current book project Illicit Intercourse: How the Sexual Exploitation of Enslaved Women Shaped the Antebellum South moves the sexual exploitation of enslaved women from the periphery of scholarly debates on power and slavery and marks its place at the center of systems of power and culture in the Slave South. This study illustrates the processes by which rape and sexualized violence and the trauma that ensued resulted in a Rape Culture that was woven into the fabric of plantation life.