Currently, I am Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College, inaugural Editor-in-Chief of Oxford Bibliographies in Gender & Women’s Studies, Series Editor of Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality (University of Nebraska Press), and immediate past President of the National Women’s Studies Association. My scholarship and teaching are primarily focused on Feminism (emphasis Black Feminisms), Hip Hop (emphasis Rap), and Media Studies.
I earned a Ph.D. in American Studies (2011) with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (2008) from Purdue University after earning a Bachelor’s degree in English Studies from Robert Morris University (2003) and a Master’s degree in English Literature from Ohio University (2005). In 2010, I joined Colorado College as a Riley Scholars-in-Residence dissertation fellow in Feminist & Gender Studies through the Consortium for Faculty Diversity. After serving as a Visiting Assistant Professor the subsequent year, I entered the tenure-track as an Assistant Professor in 2012. I served as Interim Director of Feminist & Gender Studies in 2016, and was promoted to Associate Director the following year. After earning tenure in 2018, I was promoted to Director, a position I held until 2022. The following year, I was named David & Lucile Packard (Associate) Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies, and on July 1, 2024, I was promoted to Full Professor.
My most recent project, Make Rappers Rap Again!: Interrogating the Mumble Rap “Crisis” (August 2025), is the first in the Oxford University Press Theorizing African American Music Series. In it, I contend with the claim that Mumble Rap is not real Hip Hop (or the most authentic or pure), because mumble rappers are ignorant about Hip Hop history, disrespectful toward old heads (Hip Hop elders), too similar, unskilled, prone to rapping about nonsense, and too soft or feminine. Some critics have even declared Hip Hop dead…again. Contrarily and perhaps controversially, I argue Mumble Rap is real Hip Hop. Relying primarily on discourse analysis, I examine Mumble Rap’s congruence with oft forgotten or subjugated Hip Hop cornerstones like illegibility, melody, the DJ, and the subgenre, as well as the ways most mumble rappers practice citational and collaborative politics congruent with real Hip Hop. I also take a critical approach to examining the Mumble Rap sound, arguing it’s much more complicated than it’s often characterized, especially concerning flow and production. To explain the subjugation of Mumble Rap, I situate the subgenre as southern; examine the ways it challenges dominant notions about real Hip Hop masculinity vis-à-vis attention to the mental and emotional, drug use and addiction, and the fallacies of gender and sexuality norms; and feature an interview with DJ Drama. Last, but not least, I argue Hip Hop will never die.
Previously, I published In Audre’s Footsteps: Transnational Kitchen Table Talk, co-edited with Dana Asbury and Jazlyn Andrews, in Ingeborg Bachmann Prize-winner Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Witnessed Series. I have also published in the second volume of Rethinking Women’s and Gender Studies, Womanism Rising, The Cultural Impact of Kanye West, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships, and Unteilbar: Bündnisse gegen Rassismus, and contributed to NewBlackMan, NPR, Ms., KRCC, Bitch, and Act Out. I have given talks at Vanderbilt, the Gender and the Brain Conference, the University of Georgia, the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, Portland State, the U.S. Olympic Committee, the Kampagne für Opfer Rassistischer Polizeigewalt, and many other organizations in the U.S., Canada, and Germany.
Last, but certainly not least, I’m a proud native of the Midwest—Northeast Ohio, to be precise; Alliance, OH, to be exact. Since joining the Colorado College faculty, I have resided in Colorado Springs with my husband, children, and fur babies.