I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at University of California, Santa Barbara. As a cultural and economic sociologist, I explore how people make judgments. I often use ethnography and other qualitative methods to analyze decision-making, valuation, and creativity in cultural fields.

My monograph, Bound by Creativity: How Contemporary Art is Created and Judged (University of Chicago Press, 2021), draws on my fieldwork in the elite New York City art world to examine how contemporary artists make high-stakes creative decisions under extreme uncertainty about what constitutes good art. My current book project, Performance Anxiety (under advance contract with Princeton University Press), relies on my ethnography of the Los Angeles pornography and adult content creation (OnlyFans) industry to explore how porn performers negotiate daily workplace sex and how digital infrastructures shape these fraught interactions and resulting cultural products. Other ongoing research projects include (a) an archival study of tenure dossiers to examine the construction and assessment of scholarly worth, (b) an interview study of voice-assistant device engineers to analyze how they conceive of anthropomorphic qualities in building artificial intelligence, and (3) a quantitative study on the global valuation of contemporary art.

I am Co-Editor-and-Chief of Poetics, Chair of the American Sociological Association Culture Section, and Chair Elect of the American Sociological Association Consumers and Consumption Section. My research has been published in leading sociology journals, including Sociological Theory, Socio-Economic Review, Poetics, Qualitative Sociology, Qualitative Research and recognized with awards from the American Sociological Association section’s on Theory, Culture, and Consumers and Consumption, as well as the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. My recent public writing has appeared in Newsweek, The Hill, Fast Company, The Conversation, and Barron’s.