I am a professor of sociology and American Studies at Princeton University. I primarily work in the areas of cultural sociology and stratification, with a strong focus on elites. Most recently I have been working on the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT), which seeks to understand sexual health and sexual violence at the Columbia and Barnard communities, and beyond. I am the author of Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School (Princeton 2011); The Practice of Research (Oxford 2013, with Dana Fisher), Approaches to Ethnography (Oxford 2017, with Colin Jerolmack) and The Sexual Project: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus with Jennifer Hirsch (2020, Norton). Over the next couple years I will be completing Exceptional: The Astors, Elite New York, and the Story of American Inequality (Princeton, forthcoming). With Dorian Warren, I served as the director of a Russell Sage Foundation working group on “The Political Influence of Economic Elites;” I also served as the principal investigator on a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation project using the New York Philharmonic archives to uncover the character of their subscribers from the 1870s-present.  In addition to my scholarly work I write regularly about sociology in the popular press.