At Glenville State, I teach classes related to world history and the historical profession, with a special emphasis on Africa and its peoples.  My interest in the history of Africa began at the College of William and Mary as an undergraduate who spent too much time watching South African music videos and continued at Michigan State University, where I studied Zulu and Afrikaans and received funding to actually travel to the continent for the first time—an experience that totally changed the trajectory of my life.  I became interested in the way South Africans use humor to debate and articulate national identity, which led me to pursue my first book project, Inevitable Satirists: Histories of South African Humour, 1910-1965 (forthcoming).

The key argument of Inevitable Satirists is that humour (including but not limited to overtly political satire) was on the front lines of twentieth-century efforts to draw, redraw, and challenge the social boundaries of a fragile nation that, more often than not, scholars have often treated as a uniquely serious place. Through newspapers, the theatre, and the radio, the figures I study used humour to advance unique visions of where South Africa was and where it needed to go.

My work has appeared in African Studies, African Arts, English in Africa, Social Media + Society, and Comedy Studies. I am also an occasional contributor to the South African literary website LitNet and have written articles on stand-up comedy in contemporary South Africa for The Daily Maverick.

In addition to my work on the twentieth century, I maintain an active research agenda on contemporary South African humour performance. My chapter “There’s No Such Thing As ‘Too Soon’ Here: Taking Stock of South Africa’s Comedy Boom”—appeared as an edited volume entitled Stand-Up Comedy in Africa: Humour in Popular Languages and Media, edited by Izuu Nwankwọ, and I am currently co-editing an anthology project centering audience within studies of African performance.