Overview
I'm interested in the role of experts, expertise, and numbers in political and economic life. My research has focused on debates over race and merit in undergraduate admissions, the regulation of financial innovation, and the politics of inequality knowledge. I use primarily historical methods, though much of my work is collaborative and includes collaborations with scholars who use quantitative, interview, and ethnographic methods. I am currently completing a book tentatively titled Unequal Knowledge: The Stylized Facts of Inequality which looks at the history of the gender wage gap, the racial wealth gap, and the rise of the "1%" to understand the relationships between inequality research and the politics of gender, race, and class in the United States. I have also begun a new project on "the costs of climate change." In this project, I am interested in how experts (economists, engineers, insurance companies, etc.) try to predict costs associated with mitigating - or not mitigating - greenhouse gas emissions, and how those predictions affect the politics of climate change.