I am a sociologist and interdisciplinary gender/sexuality scholar at Northern Illinois University. I am also the 2023-2024 Stephen O. Murray Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at Michigan State University.

My primary areas of research are gender, (a)sexuality, masculinity, femininity, and inclusion/exclusion. I am particularly interested in the intersection of gender and sexuality, and my work has appeared in Sociological Inquiry, Sexualities, Journal of Homosexuality, Men and Masculinities, and Sociology Compass. 

My current research situates asexual individuals (those who experience low/no sexual attraction) as presenting a strategic case sample for examining the relationship between gender and sexuality. This is both because a great deal of the performance of gender is rooted in sexuality (and vice versa) and because the demographics of asexuality themselves present a puzzle, with research suggesting that only 10.9 percent of asexual individuals identify as man/male, 63 percent as woman/female, and 26 percent as “none of the above.” 

I have quickly emerged as a leading scholar of asexuality. My research on the topic has won multiple awards, including the 2023 ASA Sex and Gender Section Sally Hacker Graduate Student Paper Award, the 2023 Sociologists for Women in Society-South’s Graduate Student Paper Award, and honorable mention for the 2022 ASA Sexualities Section’s Best Graduate Student Paper Award.

My research spans the substantive fields of gender, sexuality, race, inequality, and the family. Methodologically, I primarily apply exploratory approaches that draw upon grounded theory and inductive logics. I mainly use qualitative approaches, including interviews, focus groups, discourse analysis of secondary data, and the still-emerging methodology of digital ethnography.

Born and raised in South Florida, I moved to New York City to begin as an undergraduate at Fordham University. After receiving my B.A., I moved to Shanghai, China for two years before moving to California to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology. I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Irvine in 2023.

Prior to beginning my Ph.D., I worked as a freelance writer and journalist. My writing has been featured in USA Today, Huffington Post, NPR, Medium, and Groundswell, among other publications.