I am an Associate Professor of Sociology at UCLA. I study how ordinary people make decisions during war and genocide: why some participate in violence, why others resist, and why many look away. My research shows that these choices turn less on hatred or ideology than we tend to assume and more on how people classify one another, how those classifications shift under extreme pressure, and how the relationships people are embedded in shape what they ultimately do. Drawing on archives, interviews, and experiments, I develop testable theories of culture, morality, identity, and political violence — and of the conditions under which people refuse to do harm.
 

My book, Sacred Betrayal: How the French Catholic Church Broke Its Pledge to Protect Jews during the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2026), shows how France's most influential bishops moved from condemning Nazism to reassuring Jewish leaders of a protection they never delivered, demonstrating how genocide unfolds through quiet capitulations and broken promises as much as through spectacular violence. My award-winning research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Sociological Theory, European Journal of Sociology, Social Science History, and other journals, as well as in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times.
 

I serve as Interim Director of the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute, home to the Initiative to Study Hate and Dialogue Across Difference, and on the Steering Committee of the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. Before joining UCLA, I worked with USAID, the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate, the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, and Facing History & Ourselves, bringing research on violence and its prevention into policy and education.