My primary areas of specialization are in gender, sexualities, and social movements, with an emphasis on LGBTQ social movements and queer politics. Past research projects include:

• an analysis of mainstream and alternative press coverage of the same-sex marriage debate, focusing especially on the place of feminist and queer critiques of the institution of marriage within the debate;
• ethnographic research with an LGBT marriage equality organization to examine the relationship between professionalization and emotions in social movements;
• institutional ethnographic research on debates over medical diagnosis and treatment within the transgender rights movement as a way to explore the role of and relationships between medico-psychological discourse and practice and social movement   activity in changing conceptions of sex and gender and processes of medicalization and demedicalization; and 
• interview-based research on non-nuclear family households, intentional communities, and the role of heteronormativity in housing laws.  

I am currently conducting research on gay bars and queer spaces.

My work appears in Sociological Forum, Advances in Medical Sociology, New Sexuality Studies, The Marrying Kind?, and Race, Gender and Sexuality in Post-apocalyptic TV and Film.

I received my B.A. in Sociology & Anthropology from Western Connecticut State University and my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies, from the University of Connecticut. Before coming to UVM, I worked as an instructor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Connecticut.

I currently hold the position of Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at UVM, where I teach courses on gender, sexualities, LGBTQ studies, medicine, and social theory.