Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University with more than fifteen years in the prison justive movement.

My research centers on the study of race, religion and migration in North America. I am particularly interested in the complex ways that religion has been lived in the American South since Reconstruction, both by the architects of the (New) Jim Crow and by the grassroots organizers who have envisioned an end to this system of social expulsion.

Since arriving at Columbia in 2011, I have worked to cultivate conversations between scholars of the American prison and its alumni through teaching, programming and participatory research. In 2014, I co-founded "Religion and Incarceration," a collaborative forum for activists and academics to explore religion, power and the ends of mass incarceration. I also co-organized the Institute for Religion, Culture & Public Life’s series, “Fencing in God?: Religion, Immigration and Incarceration,” and the Graduate Students’ Association annual conference, “Religion on the Move: Movement, Migration, Missions and new Media Across Religious Traditions.”

Currently, I serve as a Research Fellow for Prof. Saskia Sassen and for the Religions of Harlem project. I am also a Board Member for Women With A Vision, Inc. in New Orleans, Men and Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction Inc. in Philadelphia.