Thematically, my research interests include the history of radical movements, infrastructure, race, labor, and diaspora politics. Geographically, I focus on how East Africa and the Indian Ocean World fit into broader global histories of radicalism and internationalist political projects. I approach these topics primarily through labor diasporas and infrastructure, with a special focus on sailors, railroad workers, and printer-publishers. My tentative dissertation project positions East Africa as a nexus of globally circulating radical visions, primarily Pan-Africanism, Communism, and Third Worldism, and how these politics interacted in particular spaces and between particular groups of people. 

My current research project traces the material and discursive contours of sedition as a concept in the British imperial imagination between 1905 and 1936. Focusing on what I refer to as "seditious commodities" I look at how the idea of sedition was developed through British attempts to monitor and suppress networks devoted to smuggling illicit firearms and radical texts into British India. In so doing, I highlight the diverse subjects and spaces that contributed to the changing shape of sedition, from British intelligence officials in London and Delhi, to Indian political prisoners in Bengal, German sailors in Hamburg, French municipal councilors in Marseilles, and British-Indian booksellers in Calcutta.