I am a historian of modern African and global history at the National Institute of Education (part of the Nanyang Technological University) in Singapore. I specialize in histories of race, development, education, and decolonization in the 19th and 20th centuries.

My first book, An Anticolonial Development: Race, Schooling, and Emancipation in Twentieth-Century West Africa, was published in 2026 as part of the African Studies series of Cambridge University Press. Focused on Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire, it explores how schooling came to be imagined as part of larger projects of Black and African emancipation. Rejecting colonial racialization and exploitation of the African body, proponents of anticolonial development instead claimed the mind as the site of economic productivity and human dignity for African people.

Here's a short blog post about my book: "Schooling and West African Freedom."

I am currently working on two new research projects. The first, my second book project, is tentatively called Ouezzin Coulibaly and Global Anticolonial Thought from the Margins. This project examines the intellectual world of Ouezzin Coulibaly, a key figure in the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) in postwar West Africa. It seeks to move Francophone African intellectual history away from a fixation on interwar nègritude and towards the post-war conjuncture. I was also recently awarded a Tier 1 Academic Research Fund grant from Singapore's Ministry of Education to conduct a three-year project called: Race, Education and the British Empire: Engaging Difference in African and Asian Colonial Schooling (1860–1947).

In addition to research and teaching, I am currently a reviews editor for H-Diplo, serve on the Editorial Review Board of the African Studies Review and the Executive Board of the Society for French Historical Studies, collaborate with the HumanEuroMed European Research Council project, and interview recent authors for the fantastic New Books Network podcast series.