I’m a sociologist of youth, race/gender, emotion, and education as well as a documentary filmmaker and committed educator. Broadly, my work explores the intersections of race, gender, and class for youth in school and community contexts and asks how young people develop and protect their inner lives in the face of considerable external constraints. I use primarily ethnographic and qualitative methods as well as surveys, film, participatory and action research.
I am an Assistant Professor of Education at Barnard College, Columbia University. I teach undergraduate courses on the foundations of education, youth constraint and resistance, and research methods in education. I have several ongoing research projects and collaborations.
Previously, I served as a Core Fellow / Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston College where I taught undergraduate courses in the University Core Curriculum. I received my PhD in 2020 from the University of Pennsylvania in Sociology and Education (dual degree), where I was a Harry Frank Guggenheim Dissertation Fellow and also worked with the Program in Urban Studies, the Center for Africana Studies, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Collective for Advancing Multimodal Research Arts (CAMRA), and the School Participatory Action Research Collaborative (SPARC).
Both my research and teaching benefit from my interdisciplinary background and the applied work I’ve done as a teacher and artist. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, I studied art history, photography, and African American Studies, writing my senior thesis about identity politics and racial performativity in the works of contemporary African American visual artists. After college, I spent some time working on the West Side of Chicago as the founding director of a high school writing center, training teenagers to work as peer writing coaches. While there, I became deeply engaged in the questions and challenges of urban education which led me to graduate school — first a master's program in Sociology of Education at NYU. From there, I joined a one-year graduate cohort in Documentary Media Studies (Filmmaking) at The New School before pursuing doctoral studies.
I am a native New Yorker and a city girl at heart, but I now live in Northern New Jersey (NYC suburbs) with my husband and our two rambunctious toddler boys. Outside of my work, I enjoy dance parties with my sons, learning (very slowly) to paint and play piano, picnics, way too many podcasts, and using my role as a sociologist to justify my addiction to reality tv!