Research

Research Focus

My research examines the intersection of culture, politics, and social change, with particular attention to popular culture, gender, and sexuality. Much of my work centers on young adult literature, especially its role in comprehensive sexuality education and the representation of sexual violence in romance fiction. As part of the “Twilight generation,” popular literature—and young adult romance in particular—was central to my own cultural learning, motivating my long-standing interest in whose stories are told, how they are told, and whose perspectives are marginalized or erased. As a sociologist, I take these questions and engage with young adult literature as a strategic case of cultural production and regulation, examining publishing, censorship, and content of books as sociohistorical artifacts.

Current Research

My dissertation examines the regulation, production, and content of young adult literature over time. This project focuses on how novels featuring minoritized sexual, and gender identities are differentially targeted by community censorship efforts; how publishing industries respond to shifting political contexts through changes in publication patterns; and how the content of young adult literature evolves over time. Drawing on large-scale cultural metadata, legislative and news media data, and full texts of young adult novels, the project employs computational methods including web scraping, text analysis, natural language processing, and time-series analysis. This research has been supported by a 2026 American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (DDRIG), as well as a Small Research Grant and a Pilot Research Grant from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Department of Sociology.

In addition to my dissertation, I am working on a paper that examines how literary awards act as a form of gendered gatekeeping, analyzing both the impact of author gender as well as gendered assumptions about genre, content, and characters of books. This paper examines how evaluation differs for both authors and books and, importantly, how the gender of the author and the gendering of specific books combine to create differential rewards.

My collaborative work includes a qualitative video analysis of how predominantly white megachurches reproduce and, at times, challenge white hegemony during periods of heightened racial tension through the selective inclusion of Black speakers. I am also working with an undergraduate research collaborator on a project analyzing the inclusion and exclusion of d/Deaf perspectives within sociological scholarship.

In 2026, I was awarded the Katherine Jocher Graduate Student Paper Award for my paper "Pride versus Prejudice: LGBTQ+ Representation and Unequal Censorship in Young Adult Literature." This award is given annually to the most outstanding article-length manuscript by a graduate student in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Published and Under Review

My published work includes a paper titled "'Stop acting like a diva': Responses to sexual violence in young adult romance novels", which examines how young adult romance novels depict character and institutional responses—such as those of police and schools—to sexual violence and is published in SSM – Qualitative Research in Health. I have also co-authored a scoping review of scholarship on the use of young adult literature to promote comprehensive sexuality education, "Putting the 'comprehensive' in comprehensive sexuality education: A review exploring young adult literature as a school-based intervention", which can be found in Sexuality Research and Social Policy (with Jennifer S. Hirsch).

I currently have two manuscripts under review. The first examines how sexual violence is mobilized within young adult romance as a form of gendered social control, as a mechanism for developing and advancing romantic relationships, and as a narrative tool to distinguish heroes from villains. The second analyzes the differential risk of book challenges targeting LGBTQ+ versus cisgender heterosexual books, with attention to variation by identity group and over time.