I am a graduate student at the University of Chicago where I have earned a masters in sociology and am working toward my PhD. This year I have been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Dissertation Year Fellowship, and have been selected as a Robert E. Park Lecturer for the University of Chicago Department of Sociology. I am also the outgoing student co-editor (with Julia Burdick-Will) of the American Journal of Sociology, and for the last two years I was preceptor for the undergraduate sociology program. Prior to coming to Chicago I studied at Montana State University where I received a BA in Political Science and a BS in Sociology in 2006.
My research interests include: classical and contemporary sociological theory, the history of the social and behavioral sciences, the sociology of knowledge / science / ideas, cultural sociology, historical / archival research methods, and the sociology of literature. Theoretically, I am interested in the study of social action processes, the nature of event and narrative in history, and the social nature of knowledge and mind.
My dissertation utilizes the prominent, century-long history of knowledge produced about George Herbert Mead to examine the nature of academic knowledge production. My work addresses questions including how authors come to be considered canonical, how academics understand and use others' work in their scholarship, and how claims to authority and knowledge are made in academia. In particular, the problematic status of the texts by which Mead is primarily known, especially Mind, Self, and Society, provide the opportunity to acutely examine the social nature of knowledge production. This project works to understand how Mead's intellectual development is related the contemporary interpretations made of his work.
Check out the Spring Perspectives, the newsletter of the Theory section of the American Sociological Association. My dissertation research is featured.
I have additional ongoing work tracing the influence of particular connections between European and American scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially concerning the interpretation of pragmatist philosophy in Europe, the early twentieth century social sciences in the United States and continental Europe, and the displacement of European scholars in the United States in the 1930s. This work seeks to examine how these international and often cross-disciplinary relationships are consequential in the development and spread of ideas.
photo courtesy of Paola Castano
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