I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Religion and Public Life program and the Department of Sociology at Rice University.
My research is grounded in cultural sociology with a focus on the causes and consequences of religious disaffiliation in the U.S. and the ways that identity, community, and ritual have been transformed by modernizing processes. My dissertation was an ethnographic case study of an "atheist church” called the Sunday Assembly and the ways that nonreligious people are creating new cultures and communities in the wake of rapidly rising rates of religious disaffiliation in the U.S. For my postdoctoral fellowship, I will be working on the Science and Religion project to study how people creatively combine commitments to both science and religion in contemporary contexts, and I will be expanding my dissertation into a book that draws on a comparative case study of the transhumanist movement in the U.S.
I also work on collaborative research projects like the American Mosaic Project, the Talking About Social Controversies project, the SoulPulse project, and the Understanding Unbelief project where I use both qualitative and quantitative data to investigate how the intersections of religion, gender, and race shape people’s social attitudes surrounding morality, equality, and community.
I have a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota, an M.S. in Sociology from Portland State University, and a B.A. in Sociology and Journalism from the University of Wyoming.