Hello! I’m a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow in Sociology at Harvard University. I’m also the incoming managing editor of Contexts, the ASA’s public-facing journal.

I study culture and inequality, focusing on parent-child relationships in young adulthood. In my dissertation, I use paired interviews with young U.S. college graduates (late 20s and early 30s) and their parents to examine how families navigate financial relationships in the face of high economic barriers to independence and persistent cultural expectations of self-sufficiency as a marker of adulthood. This project received the Eastern Sociological Society’s 2024 Coser Dissertation Proposal Award and has been supported by the Institute of Education Sciences and the Russell Sage Foundation.

My dissertation builds on insights from my two previous studies examining parents’ roles amid COVID-19 educational disruptions. The first, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, reveals how social class divides in college students’ expectations for parents’ roles gave rise to divergent coping strategies I termed “privileged dependence” and “precarious autonomy.” The second, in Socius, reveals how American cultural norms prescribing independence from parents at older ages and among partnered adult children persisted despite large-scale social upheaval.

In earlier research, I examined culture and inequality beyond family contexts, focusing on education, race/ethnicity, and religion. Articles from these projects have been published in Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Socius, and the Annual Review of Sociology.