I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University.

Perceptions of collectivities—impersonal entities ranging from a nation to a particular social group—are one of the central forces that shape politics. My research studies the primary source that cultivates the perceptions of “others” who are outside the realm of citizens’ personal experiences: media.

In doing so, I bridge theories of political communication with substantive questions in studies of economic inequality, racial conflict, and electoral dynamics. Although the term “mass media” has meant the news media during the last century of quantitative political science, I pay attention to a remarkably under-appreciated fact in this post-broadcast democracy: With the dizzying array of media choices, most Americans are tuning out the news.

This dramatic shift in information-seeking behavior has motivated me to study the political consequences of the media content Americans consume instead of news and to take seemingly apolitical everyday experiences seriously. This interest has led me to utilize a diverse set of methodologies. As a scholar interested in uncovering micro-level mechanisms and their macro-level implications, I have used lab-in-the-field, survey, and natural experiments, as well as tools of computational social science such as web-scraping and text analysis.

My book (The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy), forthcoming at Princeton Studies in Political Behavior series) explains why many Americans believe in the prospect of upward economic mobility despite growing wealth disparities. I argue that Americans’ non-political media diets play an important role in explaining this puzzle. This project won APSA’s Best Dissertation in Political Psychology.

My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Psychology, International Organization, Research & Politics, and Quarterly Journal of Political Science.

I am a recipient of the Walter Lippmann Best Published Article Award, AJPS Best Article Award, Kaid-Sanders Best Political Communication Article of the Year Award, Best Paper in Political Behavior Award, Paul Lazarsfeld Best Paper Award, and Roberta Sigel Early Career Scholar Paper Award among others. My research has been supported by Facebook and Russell Sage Foundation.

I received a Joint Ph.D. in Political Science and Communication from University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in Statistics from the Wharton School, and a B.A. in Government from Harvard University.