I study the collection of data about different populations, the management of those populations through institutions of social control, and the consequences of institutional contact.
My work sits at the intersection of political sociology, law and societies studies, and social demography. It combines computational methods — social network analysis, statistical modeling, and text analysis — with qualitative archival research.
Research
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.
This research is built on a theoretical and substantive interest in the history of privacy and surveillance in the modern United States. In my book (at Columbia University Press), I examine the historical origins of America’s fragmented privacy architecture and demonstrate that the uneven legibility of different populations and types of information is built on a foundation of legally codified exceptions.
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 is partly 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 will be an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, starting Fall 2025. Until then, I will be a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University. Previously, I received my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and my B.A. (in History and Political Theory) from Harvard University. I am also a Senior Research Associate at the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN), and 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.