Theorist, Writer, Teacher

I am a theorist of culture, religion, and belonging, and an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mount Holyoke College. My primary areas of study include cultural sociology, theory, secularism, feminist Christian theology and charismatic revivalism, progressive politics, pop culture fandoms, and representations of belonging.

My first book (in-progress), Audience Agency in Social Performance, theorizes the power of the audience in scripting, enacting, choreographing, producing, and empowering (or constraining) meanings in social life. Relatedly, I am also writing a co-authored book about the development of cultural sociology with Jeffrey C. Alexander. I am in the research phase for my second major project, a book about travel as a project of moral and national identity formation through a study of American travel writer and long-time PBS television host Rick Steves, titled A Cosmopolitan Revelation: From Tourism to Pilgrimage with Rick Steves’ Europe.

My research has appeared in peer-reviewed journals in both sociology and religious studies, including Cultural Sociology, the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Sociologica, and Material Religion, and I’ve published pop essays in the New School’s Public Seminar and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture’s The Hedgehog Review at the University of Virginia.

I received my PhD from Yale University in 2025. I hold a Master of Arts and a Master of Philosophy in Sociology from Yale, a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of Colorado-Boulder, and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Gordon College in Massachusetts.