I am originally from Iredell County, North Carolina where I graduated from Mooresville High School in 2001. I received my BA and MA in history from North Carolina Central University in 2005 and 2007, respectively. I earned my PhD in United States history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014 and am currently an associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

I am a historian of the late nineteenth and twentieth century United States and the African American experience, and my research focuses on the relationship between civil rights and black capitalism.

My book, John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), focuses on one of the nation's savviest behind-the-scenes black power brokers in the twentieth century. John Hervey Wheeler (1908–1978) spent most of his adult life in Durham, North Carolina, as a banker and a lawyer, but he was born on the campus of Kittrell College in Vance County, North Carolina. He came of age in Jim Crow Atlanta, Georgia, where his father served as an executive with the world-renowned North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (NC Mutual). When John Hervey Wheeler himself rose to preside over the Mechanics and Farmers Bank (M&F Bank), located on Durham’s “Black Wall Street,” he articulated a bold vision of regional prosperity, grounded in full citizenship and economic power for black people. In so doing, Wheeler became the most influential black leader in the Tar Heel State between the 1950s and 1960s, and among the top civil rights figures in the South as a whole.