My research examines how and why race has been perceived as “visible” in modernity. The notion that race is a visible physical characteristic is taken for granted in the present moment and conditions the practices of racial profiling and policing that violate people who appear Black, Indigenous, Latine, and Muslim today. Such practices assume that visual appearance—from skin color to hoodies—is racial self-evidence. Anti-racist, postcolonial, and feminist critiques have tended to ascribe the visual structuring of race to scientific discourses of racial inferiority. My research takes a different approach: it locates racial visibility in the field of aesthetics, where vision is constructed as an objective and autonomous sensory system. My research targets modern vision as both the structure for and the product of the seemingly a priori visual fact of race.

My current book project, Racial Sense and the Making of Aesthetic Modernity, explores how modern vision developed from a surprising place: an exceptionally literate culture. Through the analysis of a wide array of literary, philosophical, and visual art texts, Racial Sense traces how mass literacy allows race to appear visible in the transatlantic context, from the 18th century through the present moment. The book’s central claim is that reading and writing literally "make sense" of both race and vision, which enables humanist thinking and the idea of the human.

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Racial Sense developed alongside two visual art projects. The first one is a series of etchings titled Art in Theory (2015) after an anthology of the same title which I refer to often for my book research. The etchings were made in multiple stages. I approached the writings in the images as drawings, and "redrew" the writing in ways that rendered the writing illegible. Some of the etchings were printed on newsprint images selected from visual artist Ann Hamilton's installation, the common SENSE, at the University of Washington Henry Art Gallery in 2015. Hamilton's images included photos from the University of Washington Burke Museum archives paired with text fragments submitted by the public for Hamilton's installation. Art in Theory explores the distinction between writing and drawing, the question of medium, and art world narratives of conceptual art.