He teaches linguistics courses for the English Department as well as Foreign Languages, Black Studies, and Women's Studies. His research explores the relationships between language and identity, which is now extending into comics scholarship, particularly from the perspective of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. He recently co-authored a study about audience perceptions of straight and gay male characters in movies, which has been accepted at the Journal of Homosexuality , and he is currently at work on a manuscript about language and identity in Afro Samurai .