I earned my PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University in October 2014. I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Frederick Douglass Institute (FDI) for African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester. During my tenure at FDI, I will work on my manuscript Sites of Instruction: Black Childhood and the Geography of Education. The manuscript examines black writers' preoccupation with childhood and narratives of education as a means to mark dominant structures of race, knowledge and space. I also argue that narratives of black childhood enable writers to map ulterior imaginings of space, self and futurity. My research interests include 19th and 20th century African American Literature, childhood studies, literary geography and autobiography studies.