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Research and Teaching Interests My scholarship examines how labor movements, left-wing politics, and struggles against racial and ethnic oppression intersect in the Americas. I am particularly interested in how local struggles connected to broader transnational movements and ideas. I teach courses across United States, European, and Latin American history, emphasizing transnational connections and comparative approaches. I have taught courses in the history of Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, the Second World War in Europe, and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 

Key Research Areas:

• Labor movements and working-class politics in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean
• Communist and radical political movements in the Americas
• Race, migration, and left-wing politics
• Cultural history and the politics of popular literature (particularly crime novels)
• New Jersey labor and social history 

Books:

• The Red Thread: The Passaic Textile Strike (Rutgers University Press, 2021) examines a year-long Communist-led wool workers' struggle in Northern New Jersey in 1926, revealing how immigrant workers, radical politics, and labor activism intersected in industrial America.
• The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929 (Brill, 2014) analyzes how the  Communist movement in the United States developed in the 1920s, focusing on its relationship with the international Communist movement, and how the Communist International helped early Communists understand the United States. 

Current Projects:

• Research on labor movements and racial politics in Panama and the Greater Caribbean
• Studies of political themes in hardboiled detective fiction
• Analysis of black radicalism through E. Franklin Frazier's early writings
• Class-struggle defense of the International Labor Defense and the Communist Party in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s

Professional Engagement I have presented research at conferences and universities throughout the United States as well as in Argentina, Britain, Canada, Catalonia, and China. As co-director of NJCU's Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, I work to promote understanding of Latin American and Caribbean history and culture through academic programs and community engagement.