Dad. Activist. Scholar.

Work: Professionally, I'm academic staff at UW-Madison (not a professor). I help run a research center focused on politics & communication. Getting this job let our family move back home to Wisconsin so that our young kids could be closer to our parents. We had been living in Baton Rouge, where I was a professor and an associate dean at LSU. 

My work aims to change the paradigms we use to understand American politics -- it's a never-ending fight between supremacists of all kinds (class, race, gender, religion) & the movements pushing for a real democracy that produces wellbeing & equity for all. Standard accounts are gaslighting.

Family: My wife & I rent a house in Verona with our two young kids (we're skipping family names for privacy). It's too expensive to buy, especially near work in Madison, even with our two professional salaries. We're still paying off her student loans. 

For Fun: I enjoy family beach outings, playing and listening to music (I play guitar, bass, drums, banjo, a little piano, & sings -- all poorly lol), rock climbing at both local gyms, biking to work on state & county trails, playing disc golf at Elver Park, and watching science videos on YouTube. I've been a vegetarian since 2001.

Activism: My current activism is focused locally on immigrant protection & support with Voces de la Frontera. I've been face-to-face with ICE agents abducting our neighbors in south Madison, and I'm a founding member of a Verona-based group that helps to coordinate a holistic community response to ICE kidnappings in our area. I also a volunteer occasionally at a local food pantry to combat local hunger. And I'm a member of UFAS, the faculty-staff labor union on campus. 

In 2023, I succeeded in getting a transgender rights shirt on the broadcast for a major professional disc golf tournament, at a time when the sport was deeply divided over transgender inclusion. I also followed the transgender woman who was competing to show support for her. Her caddy thanked me for that.

I continue to be active on human rights, including Israel's genocide against Gaza & related issues, as I have been since college. I helped to physically but non-violently defend UW-Madison's Gaza encampment when Chancellor Mnookin ordered the violent police attack in 2024, & I advocated against the new IHRA law (led by Sen. Hesselbein) that makes Israel a protected class alongside race, sex, religion & other categories. It treats fair & necessary Israel criticisms as evidence of hate crimes. 

My academic research on antisemitism shows that Israel criticisms do not relate to endorsement of classic antisemitic views, to support for legal discrimination against Jewish Americans, nor social prejudice against Jewish Americans.

I emailed that research to Sen. Hesselbein when she co-sponsored the IHRA law, but it did not change her advocacy. I've published parts of that work in public-facing media to help improve the conversation. And I signed on to UW faculty/staff petitions stating that criticizing Israel is not inherently antisemitic (though criticizing Israel by using classic antisemitic tropes is antisemitic). 

I grew up in Appleton, WI. I played baseball, football, and threw discus & shot in track. I sang in the Appleton Boychoir & school choirs, and I performed musical theater. I was active in Boy Scouts & Civil Air Patrol. I joined Amnesty International at the end of high school, initially because it was what the other theater kids were doing.

My mom was a WEAC union elementary school teacher, and she raised me as a single mom. My dad struggled with mental illness. I saw firsthand the problems he confronted while on Social Security disability and Medicaid, including income limits that prevented him from working.

My first job was a union job as a grocery bagger. I also worked as a hotel housekeeper, a custodian, a warehouse packer, a telemarketer, & a campus safewalker. I learned a lot about difficult, under-compensated, unappreciated work, even though the jobs were short-term for me.

My best friend died near the end of high school. Processing that grief gave me a new understanding of life & what it's for, and a greater sensitivity to the suffering of others. Maybe I would've eventually found my activist calling -- I've hated bullies, abusers, & unfairness with a passion as early as elementary school -- but working through his death facilitated a life reorientation for me just as I started college in the fall 2001.

I majored in political science, but I learned more about how politics really works from my college activism. 

I started college at UW-Eau Claire before transferring to UW-Madison. I was involved in peace activism including organizing a bus full of protesters to get from Eau Claire to Madison to protest the looming Iraq War. In 2003, Howard Dean's campaign against the war, for civil unions for gay couples, & for better healthcare convinced me there was hope for Democrats during the Bush years. I knocked doors in Iowa for Dean before the caucus.

At Eau Claire & Madison, I was in Promoting Awareness, Victim Empowerment & served as vice chair in the effort to stop sexual assault & end rape culture. I wrote opinion pieces for The Daily Cardinal, with a focus on human rights, anti-war, gendered violence, and tuition that was too high, even then. I also interned for Sen. Herb Kohl and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, where (in a sign of low priority) they inexplicably put me as lead for Latinx outreach in summer 2004, though I had no useful knowledge or language skills at that time.

I encountered my first union picket line while I was a UW-Madison student. The TAA grad student employees union was on strike. I painted a shirt that said "SOLIDARITY" on the front (I still have it) & told one of my professors it was wrong to make students cross a picket line to turn in a paper. 

I knew I wanted a second major but wasn't sure which. I considered history, philosophy, art history, theater, women's studies, sociology, and psychology, along with a certificate in LGBTQ+ studies certificate. After seeing Ira Glass perform his "This American Life" show live on campus, I saw that the storytelling in journalism could marry information with artistic creativity & social change, so I ran with that. 

I went to the University of Michigan to get my PhD in political science, focused on American politics and the political attitudes & behavior of regular folks. That was where I really began to understand the impacts of systemic racism, even though I'd taken a class on Black Politics in college.

I helped lead our department's grad student advocacy group. During my leadership, we focused on improving equity by changing the department's climate -- especially for women and racial & ethnic minorities. These included policy changes to address everything from gendered class discussion dynamics to sexual harassment by faculty. 

I met my future wife while we were on strike as graduate student instructors (GEO, AFT/AFL-CIO), and I was heavily involved with the union for several years.

We got married & moved to the DC metro area for my two-year post doc at George Washington University while she finished her PhD remotely. (DC is a highly underrated city.)

I got my first job as a professor at Monmouth College, in rural western Illinois. It's an unpretentious liberal arts college. There, I worked with lots of first-generation students, students of color, and Syrian refugees. I incorporated a focus on systemic discrimination in my classes as Black Lives Matter protests gained attention following Trayvon Martin's murder. Monmouth wasn't able to offer my wife full-time work, so we took new jobs at Louisiana State University in 2016.

Our seven years in Baton Rouge helped us appreciate the positives of multiracial Southern arts, culture, & history alongside the choking oppressions by class, race, gender, and religion. (Those oppressions manifest somewhat differently in Wisconsin, but they're prevalent here too.)

We had only been in Baton Rouge for a few weeks when police murdered Alton Sterling for being a low-income Black man. That set off weeks of protests in town, including waves of police violence against protesters. Those events shaped my teaching, research, & activism at LSU.

I incorporated content about systemic oppression in my LSU classes, by class, race, gender, & religion. I talked with students about why we needed to remove local Confederate monuments, why routine marriage ceromonies at Southern plantations is obscene, problems with race-class segregation & local policing, LSU's history of white supremacy, & more. 

On faculty, I was a strong advocate for equity within my department & the broader university on the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion committee, including ensuring equitable pay for women, ending discrimination against nonbinary students in department awards, & more equitable hiring practices. I worked to ensure class readings included a diverse balance of authors by sex & race. One egregious sign of race-class supremacy was prison labor on campus. I called attention to the problem with social media posts that got wider attention (news interviews & retweeted by Questlove).

More broadly, I was involved in formal & informal efforts to improve equity for women & scholars of color, including as session leader for "What can men do to promoote gender equailty" in the biggest political science association & vocal advocacy with my large online following. I boycotted my main academic conference for several years because they grossly mishandled sexual harassment by a prominent offender.

Our first child was born in 2020, a few months into the Covid pandemic. Luckily I was allowed to be there for her birth, but our parents weren't able to visit their grandchild for months. Our second child was born in 2022. He was early, so he was in the NICU for two weeks before coming home. While on parental leave, Nathan lined up his UW-Madison job to finally return home in January 2023. 

That brings us up to the details covered in "Nathan Today."