I am Charles A. Dana Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at Colby College.

My research uses comparative and historical methods to illuminate the interplay of culture, religion, politics, and law. I am the author of Secular Conversions: Political Institutions and Religious Education in the United States and Australia, 1800-2000 (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and After Positivism: New Approaches to Comparison in Historical Sociology (Columbia University Press, 2024, co-edited with Nicholas Hoover Wilson). My research has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Sociological Theory, and other scholarly journals and edited volumes. 

I am currently working on projects investigating how symbolic conflicts influence the form and visibility of the American state, how local religious and government officials understand and negotiate church-state law, and how historical and comparative methods are actually practiced in social scientific research.

I currently serve as a Consulting Editor for the American Journal of Sociology, and on the editorial boards of Contexts, Sociology of Religion, The Sociological Quarterly, and Civic Sociology. I am a former officer of the Social Science History Association and the American Sociological Association's Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology and Section on the Sociology of Religion.