I’m a sociologist of youth, race, and education as well as a documentary filmmaker and committed educator. Broadly, my work explores the intersection 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. 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, and then began doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013. After completing my PhD, I spent three wonderful years teaching at Boston College before beginning as an Assistant Professor at Barnard in 2023.
Outside of my work, I enjoy dancing, visiting museums, picnics, way too many podcasts, and using my role as a sociologist to justify my interest in reality tv! I feel lucky to have gotten to live in many of the biggest (and best?) cities in the country, including New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston. I now call Northern New Jersey home, where I live with my husband and two young sons.