I am an assistant 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 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.

As a comparative historical sociologist, I use a variety of methods including historical research, comparative methods, quantitative network analysis, and statistical analysis, and I am interested in multi- and mixed-methods approaches to social research. These interests also motivate research on new methodologies for comparative and relational analysis.

I build on these themes in my current projects. I am currently completing a book (under contract with Cambridge University Press) co-authored with David Melamed and Ronald Breiger on regression decomposition, and conducting in-depth interviews for research exploring variation across space, time, and context in the relationship between social and symbolic boundaries across Turkey.

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