I am a sociologist who studies class inequality and American politics

I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at Swarthmore College, the Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Sociology, and a 2021-2023 Carnegie Fellow. I am interested in class inequality and social mobility, political participation and campaigns, and racial and class inequality in politics. I approach all my projects with an interest in how the world looks different to people in different social positions, and with a commitment to taking seriously the deep connections between economic inequality, racial inequality, and racism. I have written two books: Producing Politics: Inside the Exclusive Campaign World Where the Privileged Few Shape Politics for All of Us (2022, Beacon Press) and The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to Be Privileged (2019, Policy Press, co-authored with Sam Friedman). 

Before starting at Swarthmore in Fall 2016, I held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics for three years; before that, I got my PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. I draw on a wide array of methods, from in-depth interviews to large-scale surveys, from data visualizations to regression models to relational approaches such as multiple correspondence analysis.