In-Progress Projects

This section offers a window into the in-progress performances and research projects that I'm currently shaping. These works-in-progress reflect both long-term commitments and emerging inquiries that have grown from my teaching, fellowships, and collaborative work with students.

Here, you’ll find descriptions of forthcoming productions, book projects, journal articles, essays, and other scholarly contributions that are in development. Each piece represents my work as a quickly emerging scholar in my field.

New Growth, by Jasmine Nicole Cobb, negotiates the tension between Black hair's look and feel. She emphasizes our relationships to the body, public space, and visual culture through the embrace of Black hair. This book serves as inspiration for my forthcoming book on how Black women negotiate Black hair in the digital space.

Summary

I view these projects as extensions of my ongoing inquiry into Black everyday life. My scholarship is rooted in the belief that storytelling and performance are powerful tools for cultural preservation, resistance, and transformation. Zora Neale Hurston famously defined research as formalized curiosity that begins and ends with intentionality. She emphasizes that it's an active exploration to uncover deeper truths, not just gather facts. This allows the individual to understand the world and human experience. My research projects, especially those on Black culture, note this, using both external perspectives and personal knowledge.

Most of my current written work is in-progress with TPQ; however, it should be noted that the editor requested I join the editorial board prior to ever publishing in the journal due to my expertise in Black Feminist Performance in the field. This reflects the 5000+ downloads of my dissertation and live performance scholarship prior to joining Xavier.

I honor the nature of research and its ability to shift, grow, and reimagine itself over time. As I continue learning from my students, colleagues, and experiences, I invite you to explore these works-in-progress that reflect my vision. Below are short summaries of essays, edited volumes, and my first book manuscript currently in development or under review.

1. "Homing Performance: A Black Feminism Roundtable"

This is a co-authored piece in TPQ that emerges from a yearlong, post-panel conversation among Black feminist performance scholars who gathered virtually to reflect on how we entered—and continue to move within—Performance Studies. I am listed as third author alongside Drs. Sasha Sanders, Anjuliet Woodruffe, Marquese McFerguson, and Aisha Durham.

2. "Sweet Love" (Anticipated premiere: Early Fall 2026)

"Sweet Love" is a multidisciplinary performance production exploring Black love as care, tenderness, joy, and communication. Centered in Black feminist and gender studies, the performance features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, film, and storytelling that imagine Black love beyond survival. Through intimate readings, visual media, and reflective moments, "Sweet Love" invites audiences to slow down and consider love as a radical, gendered, and deeply communicative practice.

3. "Black Joy in Bloom" (Status: Revise & Resubmit, Text and Performance Quarterly)

This essay examines how performance becomes a site for articulating Black joy not as spectacle or escape, but as a radical, embodied strategy of survival while dealing with politics and grieving the loss of my father. Using examples of healing through gardening, cooking, and using social media, the essay interrogates how joy functions as a critical intervention to survive the societal pressures of being Black. Reviewer comments.

4. "Remembering Black Feminist Performance" (Status: Under Review | Special Issue | Submitted | Expected publication Summer 2026, TPQ)

This invited piece reflects on the lineage and afterlives of Black feminist performance in the academy and beyond. It argues for a formal way to honor absence, refusal, and embodied memory as tools of remembrance and resistance in the digital space.

5. "Black Performance Criticism" (Status: In-Progress | Invited Conference Panel for Publication | Expected publication Fall 2026, TPQ)

This piece emerges from a panel conversation at NCA on performance criticism and the politics of tradition and lack of diversity in how we formally evaluate our scholarship. My critique pushes toward a framework that values shared experimental, situated, and collaborative approaches to measuring Black performance in the discipline.

6. Resonant Worlds with co-editor Dr. Evan Schares, Villanova University (Status: Collaborative Book Project | In Development)

This co-authored manuscript explores sonic performance, world-making, and the affective geographies of listening. We ask: what does it mean to hear otherwise, and how might performance open portals to alternate ways of living, remembering, and imagining? We also submitted a proposal to NEH for Collaborative Manuscript Grant in November 2025. I am the Principal Investigator.

7. Textured Traces Invited by Ohio State University Press | (Status: Book Manuscript | In Progress | Proposal submission May 2026)

This monograph-in-progress examines the textures of Black hair as it appears in digital archives and everyday rituals. Drawing on Black feminist theory and performance studies, the book traces how memory, beauty, and resistance emerge through embodied practice, aesthetic labor, and storytelling.

The next section details future research projects. These are the major projects I have planned for 2027-2029.

Or you can skip ahead and take a look the fellowships I have secured which support my research and teaching goals.