I am an associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University. My research is motivated by intersecting theoretical, substantive, and methodological interests. My theoretical interests center on the assignment and consequences of cultural classifications. This is reflected in my research on legitimacy, which examines how legitimacy and illegitimacy are evaluated, established, and invoked, and how these classifications affect socially significant outcomes.

I often explore these questions in the context of contentious politics. My published research in this area combines international comparison with a particular focus on the Middle East broadly, and Turkey in particular.

I use a variety of methods including historical research, comparative methods, interviews, quantitative network analysis, and statistical analysis, and I am interested in multi- and mixed-methods approaches to social research. These interests motivate research on social science methodology. In this vein, I am currently working on two major projects: a book on regression decomposition (co-authored with David Melamed and Ronald Breiger) which is currently under contract with Cambridge University Press, and a project based on in-depth interviews with ethnographers who have conducted long-term fieldwork in Turkey, which explores the informal dynamics of field-based research.

An overview of my research and description of current projects are available under Research. My CV is available here.