I am a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
I study U.S. social movements with computational methods, building and using large-scale text and event data to understand how collective action becomes visible, how claims move through media and institutions, and when protest produces lasting change. My work has appeared in American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, and the Annual Review of Sociology. My book Rough Draft of History: A Century of U.S. Social Movements in the News (Princeton 2022, with Edwin Amenta) traces how national newspapers covered a century of American movements, and my current book, The Paradox of Reform (with Kenneth Andrews and Rashawn Ray), asks why the largest wave of protest against police violence in U.S. history produced sweeping police reforms with little change in police killings.
I also build digital archives that expand access to the early twentieth-century Black press and to Black scholars whose work shaped early sociology. These include Dangerous Press, an archive of African American newspapers from 1900 to 1930; Dare You Fight, a collection of W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings in The Crisis; and Crisis & Opportunity, which republishes largely forgotten work by early Black social scientists.
I am the editor of Social Forces, a leading journal of sociological research publishing work across the discipline—see our most recent issue.
At Carolina, I serve as Director of the First Year Seminars and Launch program. I teach Introduction to Sociology (SOCI 101) and Advocacy Strategies (SOCI 274), and at the graduate level I teach computational social science, with a focus on collecting and analyzing text data using Python—work that also produces open-source software like topica, a Python library for topic modeling.
I enjoy the trails in Carolina North Forest and am a midpack finisher in trail races.
