2026

“Juanita Pitts: Race, Gender, and the Female Hoofer.” In The Oxford Handbook of Black Dance Studies, edited by Thomas F. DeFrantz. Oxford University Press, 2026.

My research provides a much needed biographical sketch of Juanita Pitts, an African American woman tap dancer of the 1930s-50s, and analyzes of how her 1945 tap performance in a suit destabilizes dominant narratives that gather the ideas of tap excellence around a male center of gravity.

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2024

"Tapping the Margins: Feminist Research in Tap History." Dance Chronicle, (March 18, 2024), 1–26. (read-only)

​Download https://doi.org/10.1080/01472526.2024.2323887

In the early 2000s, scholars Ann Kilkelly and Mary Neth researched women in tap dance, analyzing intersecting constructions of gender, race, class, and sexuality in tap history. My article details their unprecedented research archive and examines Ann Kilkelly’s feminist, personal, and embodied explorations of tap dance history.

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Book review of Behind the Screen: Tap Dance, Race, and Invisibility During Hollywoods' Golden Age by Brynn W. Shiovitz. In Los Angeles Dance Chronicle, March 25, 2024

You know that cringing moment when you're watching an old, beloved tap dance musical and WHAM! the minstrel mask fills the screen? Behind the Screen is the complex, multilayered answer to our reaction of, “WTF?! Blackface? What was Hollywood thinking?!”

 

2021

Co-author with Susan Hebach. Rhythm Tap Teacher Training Manual: Copasetic Canon Curriculum, Levels 1 & 2, revised edition. New York: American Tap Dance Foundation, 2014-2021.

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2016

Book review: “Tap Dancing: Reports of Our Death Have Been Grossly Exaggerated: A Review of What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing by Brian Seibert.” In The Los Angeles Review of Books, September 18, 2016

This history of tap not only perpetuates the worn-out and false idea that tap dance is a dying form, it's structurally racist. While well researched, the author repeats racially charged epithets, aesthetic condemnations based in white-dominant society, and sexist statements rooted in tired ideas of jazz authenticity, failing to put biased pronouncements from 1790 or 1890 or 1990 into any historical or cultural context. 

 

Editor, Tap Dance in America: A Twentieth-Century Chronology of tap performance on stage, film, and media, by Constance Valis Hill. Database published by Library of Congress, 2016.

 

2014    

“Tap and Teeth: Virtuosity and the Smile in the Films of Bill Robinson and Eleanor Powell.” Dance Research Journal 46, no. 2 (August 2014): 21-37.

 In 1935, Hollywood featured tap stars Bill Robinson and Eleanor Powell in hit movies that intercut their virtuosic footwork with close ups of giant smiles and unnerving shots of grinning lips and teeth. My chapter analyzes how the movie industry utilized tap artistry and the smile to construct racial and gender stereotypes.

 

“Juanita Pitts: A Biographical Sketch.” Unpublished manuscript.

 

2012    

“John W. Bubbles.” Dance Heritage Coalition’s Exhibit America’s Irreplaceable Dance Treasures, 2012. 

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2010

"Queer Vaudeville: An Intersection of Race, Gender, History, and Sexuality in Tap Dance." Unpublished thesis for Masters of Fine Arts in Dance, Hollins University, 2010.

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2004    

“Savion Glover and the Authenticity Wars: Improvisational Soloist vs. Ensemble Choreographer.” Unpublished paper.

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