I am an Assistant Professor of Labor & Employment Relations at The Pennsylvania State University and a Faculty Affiliate in Sociology, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Latin American Studies, and the Center for Global Workers' Rights. My teaching and research interests include work, law, gender, organizations, labor informality, domestic work, ethnography, and the Global South. My work examines dynamics of inequality in the workplace and the extent to which external factors such as law, regulation and policy mitigate those dynamics, and with what consequences.

I was recently featured as an Early Career Scholar by the American Sociological Association's Organizations, Occupations and Work Section, and I was elected to serve as Secretary/Treasurer of the ASA’s Labor and Labor Movements Section as well as the Chair of the Latin American Studies Association’s Labor and Labor Movements Section.

I completed my Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and my dissertation, Domesticated Democracy? Labor Rights at Home in New York City and Lima, received the Honorable Mention in the Labor and Employment Relations Association's Thomas A. Kochan and Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award Competition.  Other recent work won the Cheryl Allen Miller Paper Award from Sociologists for Women in Society, the Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Award from the Sociology of Law Section of the American Sociological Association, and the Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award from the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the ASA. 

In my book manuscript, Bringing Law Home: Gendered Rights and Domestic Work in Lima and New York City, I ask, what are the limits of law as an effective instrument in regulating relations of labor inside households? Drawing from 12 months of ethnography in Lima and 8 months in New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, legislative transcripts, and demographic survey data, I examine the consequences of landmark labor protections for domestic workers—predominantly immigrant and indigenous women of color—in two large urban centers of migration with recently enacted law. My research reveals how the industry’s historic roots in colonial and racialized relations shape its legal regulation and thus reproduce those inequalities in practice inside of the home.

At Berkeley, I was a Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. I have a Master of Science in Labor Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Advanced Feminist Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where my thesis won the Outstanding Feminist Scholarship Award.

I am also the recipient of several external fellowships, including the American Association of University Women American Dissertation Fellowship, the Inter-American Foundation’s Grassroots Development Fellowship (IIE), the Mellon Latin American Sociology Fellowship, and the LRAN New Scholars Grant. I am also part of UCLA's Experiences Organizing Informal Workers research team, and a member of the Research Network for Domestic Worker Rights.

My published work appears in Political Power and Social Theory, Oxford’s Youth, Jobs, and the Future, Sage's The Social Life of Gender: From Analysis to Critique, The Sociology of WorkSocial Development Issues, Doméstica: Housemaids, and Critical Cities. Additional research is under review.