I’m a joint postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Tokyo College, the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Tokyo. I received my PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan in August 2023.

My research seeks to understand how different facets of our private lives are entangled with political and economic forces. Using diverse qualitative methods, I study how states and markets shape experiences of family, intimacy, and reproduction as well as everyday practices of gender and sexuality.

My first book project, Marriage-hunting: Dating Markets and Intimate Governance in Japan, is a study of an emergent market for courtship services. Marriage-hunting, nicknamed after the Japanese term for job-hunting, has been included in the Japanese government’s broader policy agenda addressing population decline. Drawing on over two years of research in Japan, including ethnographic observations of dating events and seminars, interviews with market professionals and their clients, and archival research, I demonstrate how this market implicates personal desires in state goals, shapes social membership, and reproduces social inequality.

My research was supported by the Japan Foundation, the Mellon Foundation/the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, among others. My sole- and co-authored articles appeared in Signs, the American Sociological Review, and the Annual Review of Sociology. You can learn more about them under the Research tab.