Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement

"One of the things that I’m interested in is the disjunction between what medieval theorists and philosophers say about animals’ capacity for language, and then how poets depict animal languages."

"...I study the political causes and consequences of the disenfranchisement of migrants, who typically embody a cultural “other” in ethnically diverse societies. In many developing countries, rural-to-urban migrants face a great degree of discrimination in destination cities, for example, by being excluded from public housing or public education. They typically live in shanty towns or slum colonies where they are invisible to the government. This systematic exclusion has a materially adverse impact on their welfare."

"...I intervene in a really active area of social science research that has advanced the claim that diversity has negative consequences for things like trust and cooperation. Basically, research doesn’t often meet the burden of proof to make that kind of claim. And this has gone unnoticed because there is a lot of confusion around the term “diversity.” Often, we will say “diversity,” when actually what we mean and what we measure is something else, something that is not really diversity at all; it’s just the presence of non-whites."