Welcome! I am an Assistant Instructional Professor of Political Science in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS) at the University of Chicago, where I am also affiliated faculty with the Department of Political Science and the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. My research draws on interdisciplinary perspectives and methods to advance our understanding of inequality in the United States and its intersections with the politics of sexuality, gender, race, and class. I study how political institutions shape group formation, political behavior, and representation among marginalized groups. My work is motivated by a broad interest in explaining how power and marginalization shape politics and has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, Politics, Groups, & Identities, Political Research Quarterly, and Sage Open.

My book project Come out Voting (UNDER REVIEW) explains how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) collective identities, group boundaries, and partisanship have been constructed and contested through activist-party interactions in the two-party system. Rather than taking groups and identities as fixed, natural, or pre-political, Come out Voting argues that activist-party interactions dynamically produce identities and groups, making them meaningful sources for mobilization. It centers the intersecting politics of sexuality, gender, and race in explanations of those processes. This book develops a theoretical framework of what I call constitutive mobilization. Constitutive mobilization unfolds over time through three dynamic processes that constitute collective identities and group boundaries: (1) internal contestation among activists, (2) external contestation between activists and dominant party actors, (3) and feedback and institutionalization. These are system-level processes that are embedded with power asymmetries. The collective identities and group boundaries that are outcomes of these processes form the basis for partisan mobilization at the mass level. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from archival sources, such as LGBT advocacy organizations, LGBT partisan political clubs, presidential records and campaign materials, as well as original survey data from a large, multiracial national survey and a second novel survey, I empirically examine constitutive mobilization in the LGBT case. By examining LGBT mobilization in the two-party system, Come out Voting has important implications for understanding the relationships between activists, political parties, and voters within American politics. The book is an extension of my dissertation, which won the Ken Sherrill Dissertation Award from the Sexuality and Politics Division of the American Political Science Association.

Before joining the University of Chicago, I was an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University and a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. I earned my Ph.D. and M.A. in Politics from Princeton University, where I also completed a certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I have also worked at the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. I received an M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago and a B.A. in Political Science and Sociology from The Ohio State University.

You can find my google scholar profile here.