I locate my research within a growing body of scholarship in critical classification studies, which intersects with critical data, infrastructure, and library and archival studies. I am an interdisciplinary scholar working across the fields of library and information science, gender and sexuality studies, literary studies, and American studies. I grapple with the tensions between standardization and local control, institutionalization and personal experience, universals and particulars, and the various kinds of knowledges and relations of power in libraries and archives. 

My book Peculiar Satisfaction: Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects was published Fordham University Press in December 2025. It examines Jefferson's role in the formation of American libraries, archives, and museums and the complexities and contradictions inherent to access to information. Surveillance in an Empire of Liberty: Why Thomas Jefferson Matters in Our Information Age was released by Bloomsbury in February 2026. That book is a set of studies that situates Jefferson's plantation, factory, and public offices as grounds for developing information and labour management practices based on an emerging prison reform movement, his vision for the young republic, and prevailing discourses about laws of nature and nations. Perhaps the most overlooked but very important legacy of Jefferson’s career is his role in the convergence of capital, state power, and racialization in what I regard as early information communication technologies, data science, and library and archival methods. I held short-term fellowships at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in the summers of 2018 and 2022.

My first book, Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham University Press, 2017), examines the history of sexuality through the lens of Library of Congress classifications. It has been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, American Archivist, and other publications.

With funding from the Social Science & Humanities Council, I have formed a collective project with library, archives, museum, and media workers and students. Useful + Beautiful is designed to think expansively about knowledge organization.