About
I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan working at the intersection of cultural sociology, gender theory, and political economy. My general research interest is in the way cultural processes—especially those involving state and market institutions—reproduce social inequality.
My dissertation and first book project, Marriage-Hunting: Markets, Morals, and Mediated Intimacy in Contemporary Japan, examines the rise of a new dating industry focused squarely on marriage. Since marriage is widely considered a precondition for reproduction in Japan, the Japanese government has endorsed this industry as an important countermeasure to the country’s unfolding demographic crisis. Based on data collected over nine months in Japan (including participant observation in marriage-hunting events and seminars, nearly 130 interviews with industry professionals and their clients, and documentary evidence), I show why and how the marriage-hunting market emerged following structural transformations and how it mediates incipient romantic relationships. I argue that by implicating personal desires in state reproduction, the marriage-hunting industry becomes one of the state’s “many hands,” a mechanism of moral regulation and soft stratification.
Some of my findings have recently been published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society in an article entitled “Herbivorous Men, Carnivorous Women: Doing Masculinity and Femininity in Japanese Marriage Hunting.” The article received four paper awards including the ASA Sex and Gender Section’s Sally Hacker Award, the Mark Chesler Award in Sociology, the McGuigan Prize in Gender and Women’s Studies, and the William Malm Prize in Japanese Studies. In the 2022-2023 academic year I will complete my dissertation with a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
In addition to my dissertation research, I have co-authored articles focusing on culture, morality, politics, and belonging which were published in the American Sociological Review (with Maggie Frye) and the Annual Review of Sociology (with Geneviève Zubrzycki).
