Wakeley-Smith works on issues of race, ethnicity, and migration in the United States and specifically on the racialization of American Roma (often called Gypsies). His current book project Gypsy Madness: American Roma, Immigration Regimes, and Race in New York City explores the ways in which American Roma were classified, represented, and policed as racialized others within the entrenched ideas around race as a Black and white problem in the Urban north. Utilizing cultural artifacts, newspapers, photographs, journals, and federal and state documents Gypsy Madness argues that Americans were able to successfully domestic the “Gypsy” while denying American Romani people equality, dignity, and self-representation avenues in an effort to shore up the racial armistice during the interwar period of immigration concerns from non-white locations.