I am  a scholar of rhetoric, sports, and racial politics in the US. My first book examines the tensions in Black political culture through the case of Curt Flood, a baseball player for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s who sued Major League Baseball for the right to become a free agent.

My scholarship then turned to focus on the possibilities and limits of Black athlete political speech with essays on athletes such as Richard Sherman and Michael Sam. I have presented research on the "renaissance of the activist athlete" in a variety of settings, including the University of Texas, the Public Address Conference at the University of Kansas, and the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

Most recently, I've turned my attention toward sport's labor politics by examining the activist potential of the NBA strike during the 2020 Covid "bubble" playoffs and in work that applies the theory of racial capitalism to the language of diversity and inclusion in college basketball.

I am currently at work on a project that attempt to explain how and why the renaissance of the activist athlete seems to have concluded, and another on how the language and culture of sport contribute to the emergence of fascism in the United States.

I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on rhetoric and race, and spend most of my free time with my Boston Terrier, Dr. Watson. And since I am originally from the Chicago area, I am cursed by geography to be a lifetime devotee of the Chicago Bears.