I joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison after receiving my PhD from Columbia University and teaching at the London School of Economics. My work studies the construction of status hierarchies and how they sustain inequality in society. It asks how we come to view different people as unequally valuable, and how this affects their outcomes. My first book, Consecrated (to be published by Princeton University Press), explores these processes in the context of the art world. It shows how, in the heyday of French modern art, market institutions created value for artists by consecrating the field of modernism — that is, by asserting the existence of a reliable hierarchy of worth among artists in a field premised on constant revolution in the norms defining artistic worthiness. My recent research brings these same interests to bear on broader issues of stratification and inequality. I have served as principal investigator on an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project using the New York Philharmonic subscriber archives to understand how cultural hierarchy became a form of status hierarchy in the United States. The database for that project is publicly available here. In other work, I explore how postindustrial forms of work expand workers’ occupational identities in ways that both entrench and undermine old occupational status hierarchies. My latest project uses experimental designs to show how, in a variety of social settings, the reification of merit hierarchies fuels inequality in the rewards received by the winners and losers of meritocratic contests.
Here is a link to my CV.