I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work at MIT. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy at Harvard.
I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. My work has been supported by the Harvard Stone Program, an American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (ASA DDRIG), a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and funding from multiple sources at Princeton, as well the Clements-DeGolyer Center at Southern Methodist University and the Portal to Texas History at the University of North Texas.
Primarily, I study the kinship networks that weave elites together. My research tracks the capture and circulation of resources through upper-class populations over time, with a particular focus on gender/sexuality, whiteness, wealth, and the United States.
Combining an array of qualitative and quantitative archival data, I have built the first-ever full kinship network of an upper class in a U.S. city, covering all elites in Dallas for its first 125 years (n = 20,342). I use the Dallas data to tackle classic topics in stratification, economic sociology, and the social science of elites. My first paper using the Dallas data, “The Family Web,” recently co-won the 2025 Socio-Economic Review Best Paper Prize.
In addition to my solo-authored work on elite kinship networks, I am contributing to two collaborative research projects broadly focused on inequality. As a postdoc in the MIT Stone Center, I am researching the histories of automation and liberalism with Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. I am also on the U.S. team of the World Elite Database, an effort to systematically compile data on contemporary economic elites around the world.