WRITINGS

My primary passion and life-activity is the exploration, cultivation, and exchange of ideas through my educational and scholarly work as a sociologist. With a background in rhetoric cultivated by my first intellectual mentor, Cynthia Willis-Chun, I was ushered into the symbolic interactionist, phenomenological, hermeneutical, and existential perspectives on life and society largely through my training at The New School for Social Research, where I was mentored by political and cultural sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb and earned my doctorate in 2021. I also studied with such scholars as Benjamin Lee, Elzbieta Matynia, Virág Molnár, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, Terry Williams, and Deva Woodly during my time at that historic institution.

My work is most profoundly influenced and inspired by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Albert Camus, Erving Goffman, Jeffrey Goldfarb, George H. Mead, Paul Ricoeur, and Jean-Paul Sartre. I can also point to Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, Lewis Coser, Thomas DeGloma, Émile Durkheim, Michel Foucault, Arlie Hochschild, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Donald Levine, Robert Merton, Rachel Sherman, Georg Simmel, Ann Swidler, Iddo Tavory, Max Weber, and Eviatar Zerubavel as minds who have significantly stimulated my own.

I am convinced that the purpose of the intellectual is to generate original insights that stimulate informed thought about pressing issues of the human condition. To that end, I'm most passionate about my public engagement - in the classroom, and through my writing. This space will house information about and links to my works as they become available.

BOOKS

In production:

Dilemmas of Allyship: White Anti-Racists and the Challenges of Social Justice - more info coming soon!

ESSAYS (SELECTED)

America the Troubled: Notes on the Political Landscape of a Divided Nation (Public Seminar, November 12, 2016)

On Dylan Anxiety (Public Seminar, October 16, 2016)

Commentary on the controversy over Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize for Literature.

The Disability Paradox (Public Seminar, October 14, 2015)

Analysis of discourses of disability vs. work in NYSED public messaging.

The Utopia of Art (Public Seminar, July 5, 2015)

An examination of the relevance of the distinct ontological status of the work of art as it relates to the social world.