research

My research focuses on the relationship between mass media and politics. My first book, Archie Bunker for President: How One Television Show Remade American Politics (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), studies how, with the success of All in the Family in the 1970s, television entertainment became political and how it in turn transformed political campaigns, movements, and institutions in it’s own image.

My current postdoctoral project “Breaking the News: Congress, Television, and the Transformation of News in the Late Network Era” focuses on congressional fights over television news in the late 1960s and early 1970s United States. The project studies the connections between network and affiliates as well as affiliates and members of Congress to show that television news was not a liberal leviathan but rather a contested and malleable institution.

Working with Norman Lear’s private collection at his office in Beverly Hills in December 2017.