I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, where I study how cultural narratives shape mass beliefs and political behaviors. My work challenges the boundaries of political science by showing that the media we consume for pleasure are not peripheral to democracy, but central to it.

Political science has long confined “politics” to elections, legislation, and policy debates—the formal machinery of governance—treating popular entertainment as peripheral or frivolous. Though Americans’ astounding consumption of entertainment is impossible to ignore, the prevailing wisdom held that its political effects would be trivial—too diffuse, too unserious to shape public attitudes in any systematic way. Yet this assumption sits alongside an uncomfortable truth that has haunted our discipline for over half a century: most Americans pay scant attention to politics.

This predilection has only intensified in this post-broadcast democracy, when choice became a defining characteristic of the information environment. In the bygone broadcast era dominated by three television networks, even those apathetic to politics unwittingly absorbed news by default. In retrospect, it was a peculiar time when Walter Cronkite’s voice echoed throughout homes nationwide, and 60 Minutes stood as the ratings juggernaut. America today, however, is a different nation. The bewildering range of entertainment options has liberated many citizens from voluntarily consuming news.

My research takes this premise seriously. I show that the entertainment people watch for pleasure—whether American Idol, Chicago P.D., or lifestyle influencers on Instagram—profoundly shapes how we understand the world around us. We now inhabit a world where politics itself has become entertainment: a former reality TV host serves as president, and political elites recruit TikTok influencers to reach disengaged audiences. A realistic theory of public opinion and political behavior must therefore begin with the media that truly command mass attention.

My first book, The American Mirage: How Reality TV Upholds the Myth of Meritocracy (Princeton University Press, 2025), reveals how the rags-to-riches narrative embedded in entertainment media sustains Americans’ faith in upward mobility amid growing inequality. My Columbia colleague Andrew Gelman described it as “the most well-written and coherent academic political science book I can recall reading.” The American Mirage has been featured in major outlets and taught in universities across the country, showing that I can make complex research engaging and accessible. I am especially proud that the book has been recognized for its sense of humor—something we could all use a little more of.

My fourteen peer-reviewed articles have appeared in leading journals, including American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They have earned several of the field’s highest distinctions, including the 2024 Walter Lippmann Best Article Award, the AJPS Best Article Award, the Kaid–Sanders Best Political Communication Article of the Year Award, and the Best Paper in Political Behavior Award.

My research has been supported by Facebook, the Russell Sage Foundation’s Presidential Grant, and the Institute for Humane Studies. I was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation (2023–2024) and a U.S.–Korea NextGen Scholars Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (2020). I am also Columbia University’s junior nominee for the 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

At Columbia, I co-teach the university’s celebrated cross-disciplinary course “Persuasion at Scale: Machine Learning, Causality, and the Information Ecosystem,” with New York Times Chief Data Scientist Chris Wiggins. The course has been described as “a model for integrating quantitative social science and data science to understand persuasion at scale.”

I also founded the Media Effects Empirical Workshop (MEEW), an open, annual gathering of scholars committed to collaborative and rigorous approaches to studying political communication. It’s open to all, and I love seeing new faces each year.

I received a Joint Ph.D. in Political Science and Communication (A&S and Annenberg) and M.A. degrees in Statistics (Wharton) and Communication (Annenberg) from the University of Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Government from Harvard University.