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About me

About me


Currently, I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at Oxford University and a Visiting Senior Fellow in the International Inequalities Institute at the LSE. I am also a research fellow at Green Templeton College.

My research is focused on understanding the causes and consequences of social, economic, and cultural inequality across countries. I am a sociologist with interests in public health, culture, and political economy; examining inequality through a number of different lenses and using a variety of methods.

To date, my work has broadly been in three areas: 1) the political economy of health, 2) the political and cultural consequences of the mass media, and 3) the cultural politics of class.

My research on the political economy of health has used natural experiments to understand whether poverty reduction policies affect health and alter health inequalities. Relatedly, I have published on the influence of the Great Recession and austerity policies on health in Europe and North America. My work on the media has begun tracing the economic, social, and political factors shaping attitudes toward the welfare state and people on welfare in the UK, with a specific focus on how the media shapes these narratives. Finally, I have used interview data, small-scale experiments, and large-scale surveys, to explore the cultural politics of class, examining how social inequalities are linked with economic inequalities.

Prior to joining Oxford, I was an Associate Professorial Research Fellow in the International Inequalities Institute at the LSE, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Oxford University – where I was also a research fellow at Nuffield college – and I worked briefly at the University of Cambridge. I completed my PhD (2013) in Applied Social & Economic Research with the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex.