Status, Work, and Intimate Life

My in-progress dissertation project, Working to Love: Expertise and Effort in Young U.S. Elites' Romantic Relationships, asks how romantic relationships can function as both dividend and constitutive process of privilege amid widespread precarity, tracing how "work" acts as a dominant interpretive frame for intimate life. Drawing on 80+ interviews with young Americans (24-40) in elite economic, professional, cultural, and educational positions about their serious romantic relationships, I demonstrate how individuals' experiences of intimacy can be alternately subsidized and threatened by "productive love," or a hybridized work-love infrastructure; how ideals for relationships come to be informed by imperatives of white-collar work; and how meaning-making changes in response, with broad implications for a landscape of already deeply unequal access to intimate relationships.

Work in progress:

• "The 'Dating Crisis' and Young Elites' Romantic Relationships" [under external peer review]
• "Productive Love: The hybridization of professional achievement and romantic intimacy"

Gender, Sexuality, and Culture

Following the call of numerous scholars in sociology and feminist and queer theory to engage critically with heterosexuality as a structure and cultural formation, I study topics including cultural representations of heteropessimism as well as women's sexual desire and response in relationships with men.
​
Peer-reviewed:

• "Reading Heteropessimism: Painful Attachments in Contemporary Literary Fiction." Cultural Sociology (2025)

Edited issues:

• "The Man's Definitive Guide to the Female Orgasm." Dilettante Army (2023)
• "How do we write about love of cock?" in “Heteropessimism,” ed. Annabel Barry, Caroline Godard, Jane Ward, cluster Post45 (2023)