(Sociology, May 2023)
Thesis Title: Contemporary Contours of National Belonging: Experimental and Survey Approaches for Understanding the Structures of the American Hierarchy
Committee: Lawrence D. Bobo (Chair), Bart Bonikowski (New York University), Michèle Lamont, and Mary C. Waters
Initial Placement: Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow, New York University Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (September 2023–August 2025)

Bio
I am a sociologist of race, immigration, and stratification who studies intergroup dynamics in the United States. My research draws from multiple disciplines, including political science and social psychology, and uses innovative methods to provide empirical knowledge about American identity, racial attitudes, and US politics. I am committed to pursuing an academic career as a sociologist at a research-intensive university. Furthermore, as a Black woman, first-generation academic and college graduate, and mother, I am eager to add to the vitality of my scholastic communities by fostering inclusion and building pathways to academic success for underrepresented people in the academia and beyond.

Dissertation Abstract
This doctoral project engages original experiments, surveys, and computational text analyses to reveal the structures undergirding the “American” hierarchy, which is distinct from the U.S. racial hierarchy as typically studied by social scientists. The former, I argue, is based on perceptions about identity and legitimate membership in the national community—that is, who is considered more (or less) “American.” The latter is commonly based on observational data, such as economic indicators and educational attainment rates, as well as stated preferences regarding social contacts, for example, neighborhood, friend, and mate selection. The structure of the American hierarchy has political implications that are distinct from other racialized social hierarchies that comprise the U.S. racial hierarchy. In addition to understanding the American hierarchy, this project shows how criteria for inclusion in the body politic are shaped through political contestation. This project primarily draws on an original nation-wide study I designed and was conducted by YouGov in August 2021 that includes a conjoint experiment and explicit racial attitudes survey of 4,500 non-Hispanic White Americans. The research shows 1) the weight of ethnocultural and acquired moralized traits on evaluations of Americanness, 2) the effects of immigration-related political discourse on inclusion attitudes, and 3) that beliefs about the American hierarchy are not universal—perceptions about racial group position and proximity in the national community vary by partisanship.

This project contributes to literatures on national belonging, race, immigration, cultural sociology, and American politics, providing both a more nuanced understanding of inclusion and stratification in American society and the effect of immigration-related boundary-work. This research was supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Immigration Initiative and the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University, as well as the Horowitz, Russell Sage, and Rapoport Family Foundations. Research from this project was accepted for presentation at the 2022 American Association for Public Opinion Research and the American Sociological Association Annual Meetings. A research article from this project has received best graduate paper awards from the Eastern Sociological Society and the New England chapter of the American Association for Public Opinion Research.