My research and teaching in the area of popular culture uses critical race, gender, and legal studies to examine the ways in which race, gender, class, and nation intersect in popular culture to produce narratives that help us to understood the structural policies and political systems that both relegate and regulate social standing in U.S. society.  My research and publications tend to be broad and, at times, oddly eclectic, as I prefer putting texts together that seemingly are unrelated.   Recent and current projects include essays and book projects on mixed race identity in literature; gendering diaspora and migration; African American cowboys; race and gender in visual art and film; African Americans and transnationalism; race, gender and geography, black masculinites in film and popular culture, and discourse on black heterosexual dynamics in popular culture.