I am a Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
My research focuses on contemporary U.S. social movements and the use of media data to understand movement processes. With Edwin Amenta, I authored Rough Draft of History: A Century of U.S. Social Movements in the News (Princeton 2022), and my work has appeared in journals including American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, and the Annual Review of Sociology. I am also editing a collection of W.E.B. Du Bois’s writings published in The Crisis.
I am the editor of Mobilization, the premier interdisciplinary journal specializing in social movements, protests, and other forms of contentious politics—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 Social and Economic Justice (SOCI 274), and at the graduate level I teach computational social science, with a focus on collecting and analyzing text data using Python.
I enjoy the trails in Carolina North Forest and am a midpack finisher in trail races.
