Narrative

I'm most broadly interested in questions about how culture shapes subjectivity or self-experience. How, for example, do cultural practices and communities inform our understandings of who we are, where we come from and where we are going, what we are capable (or not capable) of, and what is most essential and important about who we are as persons? Much of my current research agenda is focused on better understanding the role of religious practices and communities in doing this type of self-constitutive work. My dissertation research, for example, is an ethnographic study of contemporary conversions to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, focusing primarily on local Orthodox communities in the Twin Cities. Through this in-depth study of religious change, my goal is to enrich sociological understandings of how practices essential to many religious cultures - such as narratives, embodied rituals, and the use of religious material objects - help constitute people as religious and ethical subjects of various kinds. In addition to my dissertation research, I publish in the fields of culture, morality, religion, race, and sociological theory (see the "Publications" section below for more details) and I've taught courses in the areas of Culture and Mass Media, Introduction to Sociology, and Race, Class, and Gender.