I am an associate professor of sociology at New Mexico State University. I am also the faculty lead for the Data Science and Application Center (DaSA) and PI of the C3 Lab.

Research

My research focuses on questions of cognition and measurement in the sociology of culture. Specifically, I study how social contexts and cognitive structures interface to influence the stability and change of cultural knowledge and how to best measure cultural knowledge in natural language and survey data using computational methods. I have used this guiding interest in culture and cognition to study when and why white nationalist organizations shift their attention over time to border- and immigration-related grievances, how journalists respond to innovative protest strategies, the evolution of family metaphors in U.S. State of the Union addresses, how neural binding operates as a meaning-making and meaning-maintenance practice, the different moral schemas that consumers use to evaluate the fairness of price changes, how gender biases manifest discursively in student evaluations of teaching, and the varieties of social identity schemas in American political blogging, among other topics in the sociology of culture, politics, and social movements. My research makes use of a wide range of computational and quantitative methods, and I have a particular interest in developing tools for computational cultural analysis—especially (semi)automated text analysis.

My book, Mapping Texts: Computational Text Analysis for the Social Sciences (co-authored with regular collaborator Dustin S. Stoltz at Lehigh University), is now available in all formats and through all platforms from Oxford University Press.

My current and forthcoming work can be found in Sociological Theory, Sociological Methods & Research, Poetics, Socio-Economic Review, Sociological Forum, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, Sociological Science, Socius, American Journal of Cultural Sociology, The Journal of Mathematical Sociology, Journal of Computational Social Science, Social Movement Studies, and others. My research and institution-building work have been funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Center for the Study of Social Movements, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.