Since 2020, I’ve been exploring academic labor—and, specifically, on the practice of protecting some faculty from arbitrary or unexpected termination by granting them tenure. This research relies on semi-structured interviews, an original dataset of “tenured-terminations,” federal statistics, and legal doctrine. Overall, I argue that tenure is a valuable employment protection within an industry that is subject to high threshold investments, low wages, and poor exit options. This line of research has produced several articles, essays, op-eds, and an ac-trade monograph, The War on Tenure (Cambridge University Press 2025). More recently, I’ve been considering issues at the intersection of academic labor and academic speech: extramural speech, shared governance, etc.

Between 2016–17, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork on the gig economy with a view to exploring how workers understand and experience their status as “independent contractors,” who are excluded from many of the benefits and protections accorded to “employees.” This research helped me understand why our system for classifying workers, though it’s widely considered unfair and inefficient, nevertheless seems partly intuitive and difficult to escape. My edited volume, Beyond the Algorithm: Qualitative Insights for Gig Work Regulation, was published by Cambridge in 2021.