I was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970. My parents (Joan and Sam, themselves native Louisianans) moved the family to Chapel Hill, NC in 1972. We stayed there until 1988, the year I graduated from Chapel Hill High School.
Following in the footsteps of my older brother George, I attended Brown University and graduated in 1992 with a double concentration in Religious Studies and History. Among my most important teachers at Brown were Wendell Dietrich and Sumner Twiss in Religious Studies and Perry Curtis and William McLoughlin in History.
role of Manhattan project boss Gen. Leslie Groves. The work I did on the Good Society Project during this time also laid the basis for my books What Comes Next? and Making a Place for Community.
In 1996 I enrolled in a master's degree program at Union Theological Seminary in New York, where I studied under several wonderful teachers, including Larry Rasmussen, Beverly Harrison, and Christopher Morse. My master's thesis explored competing explanations for the membership decline of mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. since 1960 as well as prospects for the
After graduating from Union in 1998, I began doctoral work at Harvard in political theory in the Department of Government. During my first two years at Harvard, I focused on course work and preparation for the general exam required of all doctoral candidates. During my third and fourth year, I began initial work on my dissertation while also completing two books: More Than a
Game: Why North Carolina Basketball Means So Much To So Many, which was released in December 2001, and Making a Place for Community: Local Democracy in a Global Era, co-authored with David Imbroscio and Gar Alperovitz and released in September 2002 by Routledge Press.
My dissertation, completed in 2004, explores how three major public philosophies–utilitarianism, liberal egalitarianism, and civic republicanism–would assess the phenomenon of suburban sprawl in the United States: Is sprawl a good or a bad thing? In what respects is it good and in what respects is it bad? This exploration is informed at every step by original empirical work examining the correlation between key sprawl-related variables and a range of individual-level behaviors and attitudes, such as propensity to participate in politics and political ideology, using the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey. The thesis was written under the supervision of Harvard faculty Michael Sandel, Robert Putnam, and Russ Muirhead, as well as Ann Forsyth of the University of Minnesota.
Upon completion of my doctorate, I was appointed a Lecturer in the undergraduate program in Social Studies at Harvard, where I had taught as a teaching fellow since 2002. My responsibilities there included co-leading a sophomore tutorial covering the classics in social theory, teaching a junior tutorial on contemporary urban America, and lots and lots of thesis advising!
For more details, you can peruse my c.v. here.
And, if you're interested in reading an account of growing up in Chapel Hill, NC, in the 1970s and 80s, you can check out Chapter One of More Than a Game, which provides an autobiographical account of growing up a Carolina basketball fan.
