I am a cultural sociologist who engages innovative methods to provide empirical knowledge about American identity, racial attitudes, immigration, and US politics. I combine computational text analysis, experimental survey, and behavioral game methods to examine relationships between political discourse, attitudes, resource allocation, and national belonging. I am an affiliate of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University. My work has received recognition and support from various organizations including the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, and the Russell Sage Foundation’s Summer Institute in Computational Social Science.

In “Assessing the Effects of Immigration Discourse on Subjective Evaluations of Americanness,” I take an innovative multidimensional experimental approach to assess the relative weight of ascribed (e.g. nativity, race, and gender) and morally imbued acquired characteristics in conceptions of national belonging. Furthermore, I use experimental manipulations informed by original computational text analyses of nearly 28,000 political documents from national Democratic and Republican lawmakers to show how language oriented towards breaking down or propping up boundaries between immigrants and native-born citizens can alter evaluations of national belonging. This work is based on an original nation-wide study conducted by YouGov in August 2021 of 4,500 non-Hispanic White Americans. I am currently fundraising to expand her study to include Black, Latino, and Asian respondents.

My second line of research continues to examine the effects of boundary-work in political communication, focusing on the issue of resource allocation. This work is based on an original economic behavioral game and survey with a multi-racial probability-sample of 2,870 adults conducted by NORC between August and September 2021.

Prior to graduate school, I worked in cable news where I helped shape thoughtful conversations about inequality and marginalized communities for a national audience. As a booker for the network, I was particularly attuned to issues of diversity and inclusion ensuring that panels included a range of perspectives—intellectually, politically, and with regards to identity and representation. I remain committed to seeking out diverse viewpoints and cultivating inclusive environments where those ideas can flourish and be appreciated by all. I am a PhD candidate in sociology at Harvard University and I hold a BA in African & American Studies from Stanford University, an MA in Policy, Organization, and Leadership Studies from the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and an MA in Sociology from Harvard University.