Professor Decker work as a historian seeks to illuminate the experience of performers and creators working within the racialized spheres of USAmerican popular culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (the Broadway musical stage, Hollywood film, recorded popular music, jazz until 1970). Decker seeks to understand both the racial content of popular culture products and the racialized commercial contexts that produce this content. His methods include archival research, close reading, and digital humanities methods (including quantitative analysis and mapping). Across his work, Decker strives to name and define whiteness as a set of performed techniques and tropes existing beside and in tension with other performed racial stereotypes (such as blackness).