Assistant Professor
About
I study race, police violence, and the politics of accountability in the United States. My research asks why some police killings ignite protest and demands for justice while others pass in silence. I argue that the answer begins with families and their efforts to make claims on the state after a loved one has been killed. The decisions grieving families make (whether to mourn privately or to demand justice publicly) shape when private loss becomes a public movement. My book project, Claiming Justice: Families and the Movement for Police Accountability, develops this argument. It draws on the Police Killings and Protest (PKAP) dataset, an original resource documenting more than 2,000 police killings, along with interviews and fieldwork among the families of people killed by police.
My broader work examines state violence and its political consequences from several angles, with research appearing in the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly. I founded and direct the Violence and Policing Lab, where graduate and undergraduate researchers help build and analyze the PKAP data. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and my B.A. in Anthropology from the University of Notre Dame, and I was a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan before joining the faculty.
