"I conceive the classroom as a social space instrumental to the development of vocational, institutional/corporate and, more important, intellectual objectives. I negotiate these objectives through improvisational, practical educational tactics and self-reflexive questioning. My goal is always to balance the competing functions of university education: first, to ensure that my class helps in preparing students to take their place in civil society and in a democracy, that they are empowered and equipped to participate in a global culture. Second, I am fully aware that students may come to my class with expectations dictated by their own professional and vocational needs. And third, I try to make central and enjoyable, the very processes of an intellectual discipline as if it were an end in itself. Our entire class activities are deployed in such a way as to embody these objectives, but also to open them up, always hoping for the possibility of their redefinition."

• Seminar: Topics in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
• Introduction to World Literatures in English
• Introduction to Black Literature

• Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship 2009—2011, Department of English, Johns Hopkins University.
• The Big Ten Universities Committee on Institutional Cooperation Postdoctoral Fellowship 2008-09, Department of English, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
• Dissertation completion fellowship 2008, College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University.
• The John A. Yunck Award for Excellence 2005-06, Department of English, Michigan State University.
• Varg-Sullivan Award for Outstanding Achievement in Arts and Letters 2005-06, College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University.
• Mellon Predissertation Fellowship, Institute of Historical Research, The University of London 2004.
• Special College Research Abroad Money, Michigan State University, 2004.

• African Literature Association.    
• African Studies Association. 
• Modern Language Association.
• International Association for Languages and Intercultural Communication

Most recent:
"Du Bois, the African Union, and the Anthropological Discourse of Modernity" Social Identities. Pal Ahluwalia, and Toby Miller, eds.

In progress:
•    “Richard Wright, Maya Angelou, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. : The Ontology of Black Travel Literature”.
•    “Editing Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God”.