I joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after receiving my PhD from Columbia University and teaching at the London School of Economics. My work studies how status hierarchies are made, unmade, and how they sustain inequality in society. It asks how we come to view different people as unequally valuable and how this affects their outcomes. My first project, Consecrated (to be published by Princeton University Press), explored these processes in the context of the art world. It showed how, in the heyday of French modern art, market institutions created value for artists and inequality between them by consecrating the field of modernism — that is, by asserting the existence of a reliable hierarchy of worth among artists in a field premised on constant revolution in the norms defining artistic worthiness. My more recent work brings these same interests to bear on broader issues of stratification and inequality. In a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, I used the New York Philharmonic subscriber archive to understand how, in Gilded Age America, a status hierarchy based on cultural tastes emerged against a backdrop of democratic taste equality. The database for that project is publicly available here. In other research, I examine how postindustrial forms of work expand workers’ occupational identities in ways that both entrench and undermine old occupational status orders. My latest work explores meritocracy as the making of merit-based status hierarchies and uses experimental designs to show how the reification of these hierarchies fuels inequality in the rewards received by the winners and losers of meritocratic contests.
Here is a link to my CV.