I am a political and historical sociologist and social demographer with an empirical and theoretical focus on privacy/surveillance and institutions of social control. You can find my CV here.

My research falls into two primary categories: First, I study contemporary institutions of social control – the child welfare system and the criminal justice system – that both reflect and reinforce social inequalities, showing how institutional contact is affected by algorithmic risk scores and the state’s propensity to intervene in the lives of vulnerable populations, and how such contact in turn shapes health and family outcomes across the life-course. Second, this research is built on a theoretical and substantive interest in the long histories of privacy and surveillance in the modern United States. In my forthcoming book (with Columbia University Press), I examine the historical origins of America’s fragmented privacy architecture — how did privacy subsume a large set of political problems and become integrated into the institutional fabric of US law, politics, and jurisprudence? — and demonstrate that the uneven legibility of different populations and types of information is built on a foundation of ideologically motivated and legally codified exceptions.

In other recent work, I explain (with Elizabeth Wrigley-Field) unexpectedly low Black/White mortality disparities during the 1918 pandemic (using demographic methods and simulation exercises); track organizational fission in decentralized social movements (using social network data); and assess the impact of data suppression rules on the privacy of vulnerable children in foster care datasets.

My research, which is partly funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockwool Foundation, and which has won multiple awards (including the ASA’s Theda Skocpol Award for the best dissertation in historical sociology and the Herbert Blumer Prize from the UC Berkeley Department of Sociology), integrates demographic methods and computational approaches (including social network analysis, text analysis, and latent class analysis) that capture population-level patterns and longitudinal trends with archival research designed to uncover decision-making processes at the organizational level.

I am currently a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Sociology at Duke University. Previously, I received my PhD from UC Berkeley. I have also 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 also 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.