My work focuses on African and decolonial literature and theory, Africanfuturism, the history of anthropology, the medieval roots of colonial administrative and ideological structures, ecocriticism, and medieval philosophy and literature. 

My most recent book is Atlas’s Bones: The African Foundations of Europe (University of Chicago, 2025). Atlas’s Bones is an intellectual history about 1) the classical and medieval production of knowledges in Africa, and 2) the imposition of medieval structures of knowledge and governance on African colonies. I’m working on a related book, Blood Flowers, a study of the environmental and human costs of the African conservation and flower-farm industries, and the medieval roots of the land laws that empower them. On the medieval side, I’m writing a book called Love Without Object, a study of love objects in mysticism, psychoanalysis, and queer theory.

I spend considerable time in community engagement, community building, and radical pedagogy in Trenton, Princeton’s much-neglected and over-extracted neighbor. I’m currently one of the five members of the Princeton faculty who live there. I serve as the Board Chair of Artworks, Trenton’s umbrella arts organization, and as the Board Vice-President of Passage Theatre, Trenton’s professional theater company. 

My 2020 book Arts of Dying: Literature and Finitude in Medieval England (University of Chicago Press) is the third book in a series examining the medieval limit experience—the philosophy and literature of beginnings, middles, and ends. The first, The Book of the Incipit, concerns beginnings, with Piers Plowman as the central exhibit. The second book, Arts of Possession, examines the concept of dwelling in medieval romance and economic theory and practice.

I’ve written a number of articles on a wide range of topics: epic in Kenya; trees in Africanfuturism and medieval logic; Chaucer and Africa; Piers Plowman; grammatical theory; nationalism in medieval literature; logical fallacies and close reading; tragedy and Middle English literature; textual editing and manuscript transmission; book history; the masculine body in Middle English writing; women’s account books; medieval institutions and literature; medieval literary and philosophical form. I’ve edited or co-edited books and special issues of journals:  The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages: On the Unwritten History of Theory (with Andrew Cole), Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates (with Holly Crocker), and an anniversary issue of New Literary History on medieval cultural studies (with Michael Uebel). I’ve also written a number of prefaces and afterwords for essay collections and journals.

I grew up in Africa, learning isiNdebele along with English as a member of the Khumalo clan of the amaNdebele, and attended an all-African high school in Kenya, where I also spoke Kiswahili and early Sheng (the Kenyan street vernacular). Before graduate school, I wrote two ethnographies on groups of people in South Sudan. I used to think of my African background and my training in Western European culture as a biographical contradiction, but they have put me in the possibly unique position of working on the many profound connections between precolonial and postcolonial Africa and the European Middle Ages. 

I’ve been a Fulbright Scholar (at Magdalen College, Oxford and King’s College, London), an NEH Fellow at the National Humanities Center, a Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellow, and an Old Dominion Professor.