I am a cultural sociologist of religion. I am interested in expanding definitions of religion as well as methods of research to capture the lived realities of people whose religious or spiritual lives do not fit within existing sociological constructs. Theorizing the blurring the lines between “religion” and the “secular,” I am interested in the interpretive agency of audiences, and how religious, or religious-like, communities in media, travel, and sport form, grow, and disband around shared meaning and rituals. In a paper on American travel writer Rick Steves (revise and resubmit with Material Religion), I demonstrate how travel is not only a consumptive practice but a project of moral formation. I’ve also co-authored a paper (under review) with Religious Studies scholar Dr. Cody Musselman on the January 6th insurrection and the 2022 CrossFit Games as performances of civil religion and white Christian nationalism.

I am also a cultural theorist. In an award-winning paper published in Cultural Sociology, I develop a theory of audience agency in the cultural pragmatics tradition of social performance theory via an illustration of Bernie Sanders’ political movement. A second paper (forthcoming with the American Journal of Cultural Sociology) builds off of the first to articulate how audiences wrest interpretative authority away from actors through a case study of a Harry Potter podcast community’s changing relationship with J.K. Rowling.

Currently, I am a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University, where I am a Junior Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. I am also a Fellow at the Center for Media, Religion, and Culture in the Dept. of Media Studies at CU Boulder. My dissertation theorizes the concepts of charisma, enchantment, and the sacred through the lens of “performing religion” and case studies of sport, travel and fandom.

Prior to Yale, I earned a B.A. in History from Gordon College in Massachusetts and a second B.A. (with highest honors) in Sociology from the University of Colorado Boulder. Since 2011, I’ve also worked for Apple, Twitter, and Bernie 2016.