I focus mainly on Black women's pre-1954 participation in higher education. I also explore leading educators' contributions to academic praxis. Intellectual history, development of higher education in the United States, and trends in educational opportunity underlie interest in women such as Mary Annette Anderson, Willa Player, Anna Julia Cooper, and Mary McLeod Bethune. Other areas of interest are U.S. social history between Emancipation and school desegregation, Black women's 20th century organizations, the impact of cultural identity on educational attainment and social mobility, and the connection of higher education to performing arts and social justice movements.

My manuscript on Black women's educational history, Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History, was published by the University Press of Florida (February 2007). The first run of cloth sold out and the paperback edition became available in May 2008. Black Women in the Ivory Tower chronicles Black women's struggle for access to higher education and presents historic philosophies of influential scholars.Part One, an educational history, begins in 1850, when Oberlin conferred the first college diploma upon Lucy Stanton and continues through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.Part Two, an intellectual history, presents Black women's philosophies of higher education between Anna Cooper's 1892 A Voice from the South and Mary McLeod Bethune's 1955 "Last Will and Testament."

In addition to producing a book manuscript, I have sought to advance the interdisciplinary fields of Black studies and women's studies. By co-editing books and publishing articles in journals such as African Americans and Community Engagement in Higher Education, GRIOT, Journal of African American History, International Journal of Women's Studies, Black Women, Gender, & Families, Feminist Teacher, International Journal of the Humanities, and African American Research Perspectives, I engage in national and international discussions about the relationship between academic scholarship and cultural identity. Historic African American women educators utilized experiential education to foster transformation of both colleges and communities.

My praxis of applied learning is central to my research agenda. I have focused on Black women's intellectual production and how their thought can advance current imperatives to recruit and support a diverse student and faculty population in higher education. I am especially interested in the development of graduate training in Africana Studies in two areas: first, I am interested in curricular decisions and how comprehensive exams are shaped; second, I am invested in (re)connecting critical research with service, service-learning, and community-based research. I am interested in building communities both intellectually and practically.

I reluctantly call myself a historian. Though I study history and use historiographical methodologies, my main frames of philosophical, theoretical, and methodological approaches are grounded in the interdisciplines of Black studies and women's studies.

My work in historiography is inspired by scholars from Richard Marius and Benjamin Quarles to Ellen DuBois, Darlene Clark Hine, and Deborah Gray White. My philosophical assumptions of academic work in history encompasses at least four areas:

1. I use history to connect the past to the present for identity, order, understanding, and survival; I argue that history is not value free.
2. I agree with those who see history as dynamic--it represents both continuity and change. History of previously marginalized populations are not merely stories of victimization; there are varying tensions between race, class, gender, religion, and many other characteristics of people, places, objects, and ideas in all demographics. As historians change, so does the account of history.
3. My historiography is interdisciplinary and creative as much as it is rigorous and "scientific" (I adhere to certain traditional standards of excellence, even as I challenge others).
4. I experience history as a useful means toward the goal of social justice. Thus, it is imperative to create an intellectual democracy--providing educational access as both a human and civil right--to increase historical knowledge and broaden human understanding by ensuring marginalized populations the right of self-definition.

My work lies at the intersection of African American, women's, educational, and intellectual history. My eras of interest are Jim Crow, Jazz Age, and the Civil Rights Movement because these time periods reflect the foundations of African American women's intellectual contributions.