I am a comparative-historical sociologist and PhD candidate in Sociology at UCLA, working at the intersection of political sociology, race and ethnicity, and sociology of culture.

My research asks how racial and cultural hierarchies are built to feel natural and permanent, and how they come undone. I develop a model centered on two dynamics that shape each other over time: alignment, the coordination among state actors, economic elites, and intellectuals that lets them impose durable representations, and contestation, the efforts of subaltern actors to advance competing narratives by achieving cultural resonance in civil society. Existing theories of political sociology identify the actors and alliances involved, but don’t explain how their different forms of power combine, or how the narratives they produce shift over time.

I develop this interactive model in my dissertation and extend its guiding question—how racial and cultural hierarchies are made and unmade—into two other sites: colonial visual culture and the formation of the American musical canon.