I study patterns of state contact and the politics of personal data in the Information Age.
My work sits at the intersection of political sociology, law and society studies, and social demography. It combines computational methods — social network analysis, statistical modeling, and text analysis — with qualitative archival research.
Research
My work on contemporary institutions of care and social control – the child welfare system and the criminal justice system –, investigates how algorithmic risk scores and the state’s propensity to intervene unevenly in the lives of vulnerable populations shape health and family outcomes.
My historical research focuses on the long arc of privacy and surveillance in the modern United States. In my book The Limiting Principle: How Privacy Became a Public Issue, I examine the fragmented origins and legally codified exceptions of America’s privacy architecture.
Other work explains unexpectedly low Black/White mortality disparities during the 1918 pandemic and assesses the impact of data suppression rules on the privacy of vulnerable children in Child Protective Services datasets.
My research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Rockwool Foundation and has won multiple awards—including the Theda Skocpol Award for the best dissertation in historical sociology, several ASA section paper awards, and the Herbert Blumer Prize and Public Sociology Prize from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology.
Affiliations
I am Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a faculty affiliate at the Center for Demography and Ecology, and a senior research associate at the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect.
Previously I received my B.A. (in History and Political Theory) from Harvard University and my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and was a postdoc at Duke University. I have been a fellow at the Berkeley Center for the Study of Law and Society, the Institute of International Studies, and the Institute for Global Change.
I have written, or still write occasionally, for publications like Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, the New Statesman, the Wall Street Journal, and Open Democracy, or for institutions like the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung and Chatham House.