I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in 2009 and am currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at Grand Valley State University.

My research and teaching interests include  gender, sexuality, violence, transgender studies, social movements, the media, methods, and poststructuralist theory. My current projects focus on the inner workings of the sex/gender/sexuality system. I utilize a range of research methods, including textual analysis, statistical analysis, and interviews to examine how this system shapes and is shaped by understandings of violence, the practices of social movements, and the construction of sociological knowledge.

My research projects currently fall into three main areas:

• Transgender rights, with a focus on how beliefs about sex, gender, and sexuality are deployed to restrict those rights.
• Examining and working to improve survey measurement of sex, gender, and sexuality.
• Anti-violence activism, particularly that activism done in an identity politics model.