Throughout my career, I have been excited by the idea that we can use scientific tools to help us understand the society that we live in. Initially, I was fascinated by protest movements and I wrote two books on that subject: From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became and Academic Discipline (2007, the Johns Hopkins University Press) and Party in the Street: The Antiwar Movement and the Democratic Party after 9/11 (2015, Cambridge University Press, co-authored with Michael T. Heaney). I continue to conduct research on the Black Lives Matter movement, and you can click here to read this article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the impact of BLM protest on American culture.

Later in my career, I developed interests in other areas of social research such as computational social science, economic and cultural sociology, and social theory. For example, I have written a book on the organization of contemporary art: Two Visions of the Art World: Competition, Community, and Creative Work (2026, Oxford University Press, co-authored with David de la Torre). 

I have been committed to bringing the best of sociology to the public. From 2017 to 2022, I edited Contexts: Sociology for the Public, the official magazine of the American Sociological Association, and I have written op-eds for media  such as The Washington Post, USA Today, and The Hill.