About Me
Making music has been a constant in my life.
When I was 11 years old, I wanted a musical instrument of my own, though I didn’t have a strong preference for any one in particular. As I considered my options, my father wagered a suggestion, “Play bass. It’s easier to get into bands and music scenes as a bass player.” The social wisdom that underpinned my father’s suggestion that day inspired my decision to learn my first musical instrument. And it was impossible to know then, but this wisdom would also get me through a doctoral research project and turn me into the cultural sociologist I am today.
When I turned 13, I had two years of bass guitar lessons under my belt. I could hold the instrument properly, get nice sounds out of it, and play it along to recordings. What seemed like the natural next step to me was to write a song of my own. The next time I walked through to the back of my local music store and into my lesson, I was driven by one specific question. I do remember asking my music teacher “How do you write a song?” but I don’t, however, remember getting a satisfying answer.
While this question once drove my young self to develop a creative practice, I have held on to this curiosity and it continues to drive me. I employed this curiosity as a resource throughout the final formal phase of my training as a sociologist, resulting in my dissertation "Three Pathways of the Creative Process: How Cognition, Situations, and Relationships Facilitate Culture Creation in Songwriting Teams."
My ongoing research projects investigate the sociological dimensions of creativity, art, and taste.
I currently hold a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship and work out of NYU’s sociology department.