I am a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
My research focuses on U.S. social movements and the use of media data to understand movement processes. My work has appeared in journals including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, and the Annual Review of Sociology, and with Edwin Amenta I wrote Rough Draft of History: A Century of U.S. Social Movements in the News (Princeton 2022).
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 1905 to 1929; 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.
