Born New York (1978) Schools St. Paul’s School Haverford College University of Wisconsin
Columbia University Live New York Family Maine London Ireland Pakistan I am an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University in New York. I’m primarily interested in culture and inequality. The majority of my research is ethnographic. My first book, Privilege, is an study of St. Paul’s School, one of the most elite boarding schools in the country. I studied St. Paul’s to better understand how social advantages are produced. A particularly pressing question from this work is how social institutions have opened their doors while inequality has dramatically increased. This question is something I am carrying forward into my next projects. My work has been featured in several nation media outlets. Though my early work has been firmly Americanist in its empirical focus, with Dorian Warren I am starting an international working group on elite research. And my work on deliberative political decision making is expanding; working with the Runnymede Trust I will be doing a series of studies on deliberative politics among multi-ethnic populations in London and Birmingham.