AREAS OF INTEREST

• Environmental Sociology

• Environmental Justice

• Cultural Sociology

• Human-Animal Interactions

• Ideas of Nature

I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Virginia Tech University. I earned my PhD in Sociology in 2021 at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University  My research lies at the intersection of environmental and cultural sociology and centers on ideas of nature, meaning making, and human relationships with the nonhuman environment. My forthcoming book, which will be published in 2025 by University of Chicago Press, is a multi-sited examination of various programs of rat extermination, eradication, and control, titled Bad Nature: How Rat Control Shapes Human and Nonhuman Worlds. In this project I combine diverse forms of data, including ethnographic participant observation, interviews, archival historical materials, and survey data. By looking at these violent geographies of rat control, I examine how relationships with some of our least-loved nonhuman companions reverberate through the broader fabric of social life.

My approach to this work is interdisciplinary, contributing to conversations around society, culture, and environment that include scholarship from history, geography, english, and anthropology, among other fields of study. I also employ a range of methodological approaches in my research, including ethnography, content analysis, and computational text analysis, among others.

Recently, I have worked to synthesize qualitative and computational methods to better understand cultural ideas of nature, especially as they relate to social inequalities. Some of this work has combined spatial GIS methods with text analysis to examine the narratives of nature that animate the tourism industry. My current work uses these same tools and more to investigate how cultural meaning intersects with urban greening initiatives, especially street trees.