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I am a scholar of the history of Africa and its diaspora in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds whose research explores themes of performance, labor, and heritage. I earned my Ph.D. in History from Emory University and have held fellowships at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and from the Fulbright-Hays Program. My first major project, Masquerading Politics: Kinship, Gender, and Ethnicity in a Yoruba Town, Otta, 1774–1928 (Indiana University Press, 2018), reimagines Yoruba political and cultural history through 19 months of fieldwork in southwestern Nigeria. This work demonstrates how ritual masquerades shaped artistic, religious, and political life while serving as arenas for contestations over labor and authority. It challenges fixed notions of gender in Africanist scholarship and was recognized as a finalist for the 2019 African Studies Association Best Book Prize and winner of the 2020 Yoruba Studies Book Prize. My current research extends into critical heritage studies and GIS to investigate Africa’s role in Gulf pearling. Drawing on archival sources, manumission records, ethnography, and oral histories, I recover the experiences of Africans and their descendants who labored in pearling communities and examine how their presence has been erased from official heritage narratives. Supported by a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, this work uses GIS mapping to visualize the socio-spatial dynamics of pearling and to illuminate the intertwined histories of Africans and Arabs in the Gulf.