Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, hosted by the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California.

Working at the intersection of culture, law, and the economy, my research engages a fundamental yet relatively unexplored sociological puzzle: how are unowned things transformed into property for the first time? Focusing on the moral logics of intellectual property (IP) law and policy, I use qualitative methods to study how the changing definitions and rewards of creativity in science, technology, and culture affect ownership horizons.

My doctoral dissertation and now book project, Properties of Color: How Corporations Came to Own the Visible Spectrum, investigates the question: is it possible for a corporation to own a color? I argue the surprising answer is, indeed, yes. Beginning with the invention of synthetic dye production during the Second Industrial Revolution and concluding with the U.S. Supreme Court decision permitting color trademarks in 1995, the book offers a genealogy of color’s assimilation into the intellectual property regime over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The project also introduces the sociological concept of “propertization”—the social process by which previously unowned things are made appropriable as property. I theorize this as a form of economic accumulation transacted through moral justification rather than, for example, monetary exchange.

I have conducted research and policy analysis at the World Intellectual Policy Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, and UNIFEM, the former UN Development Fund for Women in New York. My scholarly work has been published in the Annual Review of Sociology, The American Sociologist, and New Geographies. It has been supported by the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and the North American Mobility Project, as well as the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography and Social Thought and the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at the New School.

In addition to my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from the New School for Social Research, I hold an M.A. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University.

Areas of interest: Intellectual property law and policy; sociological/social theory; sociology of culture; economic sociology; sociology of law; science, knowledge, and technology; media studies; gender studies; visual studies and methods.