I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. My research interests include work, law, gender, labor informality, social theory, ethnography, and the Global South. My work examines dynamics of inequality in the workplace and the extent to which external factors such as law, regulation and policy mitigate those dynamics, and with what consequences.
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I am a recipient of several competitive national fellowships, including the American Association of University Women American Dissertation Fellowship, the Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship (IIE), the Mellon Latin American Sociology Fellowship, and the LRAN New Scholars Grant. I am also part of UCLA's Experiences Organizing Informal Workers research team, and a member of the Research Network for Domestic Worker Rights.
Another current project (with economist Hilary Wething of the Economic Policy Institute) explores the effects of paid family leave on maternal mental health and time use for new mothers, and a second project (in collaboration with Oxfam America and Rural Sociology colleagues at Penn State) examines the reproduction of gender and racial inequality for migrant poultry plant and meatpacking plant workers.
My book, Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights, is forthcoming August 2025 on Stanford University Press. The book draws upon over 24 months of ethnography in Lima, Peru and New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, and analysis of legislative transcripts. Through a Global South/North comparison, I find that coloniality is deeply embedded in contemporary relations of household service, revealing important distinctions in how we understand power, domination, and inequality in the home and the workplace.
My published work appears in Political Power and Social Theory, Oxford’s Youth, Jobs, and the Future, Sage's The Social Life of Gender: From Analysis to Critique, The Sociology of Work, Academy of Management Discoveries, Contemporary Sociology, Social Development Issues, Doméstica: Housemaids, and Critical Cities. Additional research is under review.
I previously served as Secretary/Treasurer of the ASA’s Labor and Labor Movements Section and Chair of the Latin American Studies Association’s Labor and Labor Movements Section, and I was previously featured as an Early Career Scholar by the American Sociological Association's Organizations, Occupations and Work Section.