BU Sociology

BIO AND RESEARCH

I am an ethnographer with interests in popular culture and markets. I received a B.A. in sociology from the University of Georgia in 2002, a M.A. in sociology from New York University in 2003 and a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University in 2009. In my teaching and research, I explore the intersections of culture and economy and investigate how gender, race, and class inequalities inform the making of pop culture.

My forthcoming book, Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, examines the social production of value in fashion modeling markets. Through ethnography, I traced the backstage work and collaboration behind the fashion “look” in modeling markets in New York and London. I discovered an organized production process that goes into producing something most people take for granted as a natural state: beauty. These production processes are structured along racial and gendered lines, such that markets in cultural production like fashion ultimately become sites for the reproduction of cultural inequalities.

Building off of this research, I am starting a new project on the global context of cultural production. I am particularly interested in the cultural and economic underpinnings of the global model scouting industry, which supplies fresh talent, often from developing countries, to fashion capitals like Paris, New York, and Tokyo. This research will trace the global flows of value in this culture industry and discover how beauty, race, and gender differences are imagined and produced across and within international borders.

SELECT PUBLICATIONS

Pricing Beauty: The Making of Fashion Models (forthcoming). Berkeley: University of California Press.

2009. With Frèderic C. Godart. “How Do Cultural Producers Make Creative Decisions? Lessons from the Catwalk.” Social Forces (forthcoming, December 2009).

2008. “Discipline of the Catwalk: Gender, Power and Uncertainty in Fashion Modeling.” Ethnography 9(4): 429-456.

2005. With William Finlay. “Not Just a Paper Doll: How Models Manage Bodily Capital and Why They Perform Emotional Labor.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 34(3):317-343. Reprinted in Sociological Odyssey: Contemporary Readings in Introductory Sociology, eds. Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler. Third Edition, Wadsworth Cencage (2009). Also reprinted in Women’s Lives, by Kathleen J. Ferraro. Allyn & Beacon (2009).