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My research is focused on the historical production of human differences and their attendant social and material inequalities. My work also assesses differences as productive mechanisms of affiliation, identity, coalition, and struggle.  Informed by queer, feminist, materialist, critical race, and spatial theory, my research is engaged primarily with the categories we now know as sexuality, gender, class, race, and region.

My work has been supported by awards and commendations from the American Studies Association, Arts and Humanities Research Council, British Academy, Delfina Studio Trust, Fulbright Commission, Rockefeller Foundation, and King’s College London Student Union, among others.

My current monograph project is tentatively titled Pair-Bonding: Photographic Sequences and American Documentary Traditions.  As part of my practice-led research in photography, images from my Cruising Ground series recently have been exhibited in group shows at the British Museum, London, and SOMArts, San Francisco.

A photo-essay on the sub-prime mortgage crisis has appeared in Southern Spaces.

Books include:

• Concentration Camps on the Home Front: Japanese Americans in the House of Jim Crow (2008)
• Men Like That: A Southern Queer History(1999), both from the University of Chicago Press.

My next book-length project, tentatively titled The People and Plots of Palomares, concerns the Spanish farming community contaminated by a U.S. Air Force hydrogen-bomb disaster in 1966, as well as the gendered and sexualized discourses of nuclear proliferation and contamination resulting from it. An early photo essay on the topic appears in Southern Spaces: http://www.southernspaces.org/2011/palomares-bajo

I supervise a number of doctoral projects in visual culture studies and the history of gender and sexuality. Former supervisees have secured permanent lectureships at the University of Dundee and Sheffield Hallam University, as well as public history positions, as at the Library of Congress.