She is the author of the prizewinning A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (University of Chicago Press, 2006), and in 2015 she edited the widely-acclaimed Norton Critical Edition of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.

In 2016, she was awarded Sidonie Miskimin Clauss ’75 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities by Yale College, and was nominated for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Faculty Mentor Award the same year. She chaired Yale’s African American Studies Department (2014-22), and now serves on the Provost’s Budget Advisory Group. She’s currently at work on two book projects: Writing from the Lower Frequencies: African American Literature and Its Mid-Century Moment and Being Better Than the World: The Art and Life of James Baldwin.

The research required to launch Writing from the Lower Frequencies led Goldsby to design and direct “Mapping the Stacks: A Guide to Black Chicago’s Hidden Archives.” Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, she managed that project from 2005-10, while at the University of Chicago. “Mapping the Stacks” helped transform the practice of archival recovery and description in Chicago and across the U.S as the project became the model for the Council on Library and Information Resources’ $27.4 million grant program, “Cataloguing Hidden Collections and Archives” (2008-14). Together with Meredith McGill (Rutgers University), Goldsby now co-directs The Black Bibliography Project. This Mellon-funded initiative aims to build an electronic database whose information sources and data design challenge the traditional conventions of bibliography by incorporating the values that the African American artistic, scholarly, and curatorial communities have long brought to the practice of making and preserving Black texts.