I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Texas A&M University. My teaching and research interests include law, gender, labor informality, domestic work, ethnography, and the Global South. My research 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.

 With funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the Inter-American Foundation, my book, Bringing Law Home: Gender, Race, and Household Labor Rights, draws from over 24 months of ethnography in Lima, Peru and New York City, 120 in-depth interviews, and analysis of legislative transcripts. Through a Global South/North comparison, it focuses on the home as a site of paid labor and as a microcosm of social and symbolic boundaries, bringing feminist theory, race, gender and migration into conversation with law and labor legislation.

One of my current projects (with Hilary Wething of the Economic Policy Institute) explores the effects of paid family leave on maternal mental health and time use for new mothers, and the second project (in collaboration with Oxfam America and Rural Sociology colleagues at Penn State) examines the reproduction of gender and racial inequality for migrant poultry plant and meatpacking plant workers.

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.

View fullsize

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 Work, Social Development Issues, Doméstica: Housemaids, and Critical Cities. Additional research is under review. 

---