scholarship, and literature. While at Virginia Tech, I developed a new course titled “Plantation Politics: The Black Sport Experience,” to offer a critical look at the role that sports play in shaping Black life broadly. This course engaged with Black feminist scholarship on sports, as well as work from within race, gender, and sexuality studies more broadly. My teaching philosophy centers on the feminist axiom, “the personal is political,” as I believe that personal experience can lend insight and clarity into larger social problems. My students often read a novel or memoir in my courses rather than standard textbooks, while also engaging in creative projects like podcasts, and my social inequality annotated playlist assignment, available via the American Sociological Association’s Teaching Research and Innovations Library for Sociology (TRAILS). The assignment allows students an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge and understanding surrounding issues of social inequality via music. This assignment has been adapted by other professors in the U.S. and abroad. 

Over the years I have taught and co-taught several courses including: Introduction to African American Studies (undergraduate), Social Inequality (undergraduate), Race & Ethnicity (undergraduate), Race & Racism (undergraduate), Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality (undergraduate), Plantation Politics the Black Sport Experience (undergraduate), Black Aesthetics: Black Girl Magic (undergraduate), Making All Black Lives Matter (undergraduate), Sociology of Sports (undergraduate), The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois (undergraduate/graduate), Introduction to Social Inequality (graduate).