My research examines subversion, and participation in overseas expansion, with a focus on the diverse experience of African Americans during the age of empire. My dissertation, entitled “Loyalism and Empire: African Americans and Overseas Expansion, 1877-1915,” explores how African Americans navigated service to a nation and foreign policy that exported and supported racial oppression. Empire contained contradictory prospects; the advent of novel opportunities that would supposedly alleviate racial oppression that simultaneously reified white supremacy domestically and abroad. I examine the various in which this manifested by placing African Americans as central actors in turn-of-the-century debates over the form and nature of American Empire.