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I am an Assistant Professor of Sociology at University College Dublin.

I am a sociologist of everyday life. I study how we can spend more of our time living. My research interests focus on social demography, sociotemporal disparities in well-being, and eco-social determinants of health. 

My work has been funded by Enterprise Ireland, UKRI's Economic and Social Research Council, UK Academy of Medical Sciences, National Science Foundation, United States Agency for International Development, UC Berkeley's Canadian Studies Program, UC Berkeley's Social Sciences Data Laboratory, and by the Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

I have collaborated with the Colchester City Council, the Barcelona Time Use Initiative for a Healthy Society, Eurofound, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, USAID, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative. Public media outlets featuring my research include The Conversation, RTÉ, World Economic Forum, Daily Maverick, Magdalene, and Phys.org.

I received joint PhDs in Sociology and Demography from the University of California, Berkeley. I earned a BA in Sociology from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

When not pondering the minutia of time, I love traveling (preferably by motorcycle, boat, or train), photography (especially ephemeral street art), painting (mainly acrylic), studying internal martial arts (perpetual beginner in chen style tai chi, bagua, hsing-i), binge watching time travel movies (I know... just when you were starting to like me... well, no one's perfect) and playing my handpan and didgeridoos.

Recent Publications

Out of Time, Out of Mind:
Multifaceted Time Perceptions and Mental Well-Being During the COVID-19 Pandemic

2023
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Individuals commonly report feeling rushed in industrial societies such as the United States. However, social and economic upheavals such as disasters, recessions, and pandemics complicate perceptions of time by disrupting routines and creating experiences of trauma. In existing research, time perceptions usually are studied separately, leaving unclear how individuals in the United States might experience time in multifaceted ways while working, caring, and grieving. Moreover, previous research has not established whether multifaceted time perceptions each carry independent influences on mental well-being, or how they are shaped by sociodemographic background or pandemic-related stressors. Drawing on national Gallup data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic (Spring 2021), we find that Americans generally report some degree of feeling rushed, and also perceive multiple types of time disorientation involving slowness, quickness, and days and weeks blending together. Perceptions that time is moving too quickly or too slowly show an inverse relationship as expected, but feeling rushed and that days or weeks are blending together also show relationships with both of these perceptions over a three-month recall period. Importantly, we find that each of these time perceptions is shaped uniquely by income, work hours, age, or having children at home, and that each matters for understanding levels of depressive and anxiety symptoms and overall sense of mastery or control in life. Pandemic-related stressors, including economic strain, working from home, homeschooling a child, and severe household conflict, also show considerable relationships with these multifaceted time perceptions.

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