The Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy is excited to welcome the first Stone Program Postdoctoral Fellows. Luis Flores and Shay O'Brien will begin their fellowships in September 2023.
Luis Flores is a recent doctoral graduate in sociology from the University of Michigan, and incoming Assistant Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley (Fall 2025). Drawing on historical methods, his research examines the regulatory politics at the boundary of home and market, shaping the extent to which homes can serve as sites of production, exchange, and speculation. His previous work examined how early American zoning laws shaped wealth and labor dynamics through the separation of home and market. His current research turns to the contentious blurring of home and market in the post-industrial present. As a Stone Postdoctoral Fellow, Luis is expanding his dissertation, The Regulatory Politics of Home-Based Moneymaking After the American Family Wage, into a book manuscript. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the American Sociological Association (ASA), and received awards from four ASA sections.
Shay O'Brien studies the kinship networks that weave elites together. Her research tracks the capture and circulation of resources through upper-class populations over time, with a particular focus on women, whiteness, and wealth. Combining an array of qualitative and quantitative archival data, she has built the first-ever full kinship network of an upper class in a U.S. city, covering Dallas high society from the Gilded Age to the Second World War. Her first major project uses the Dallas data to tackle classic topics in stratification and the sociology of elites, including multigenerational class transmission, elite turnover, and inheritance. She will receive her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University this summer. Before graduate school, Shay worked on a large-scale randomized control trial at the social policy research firm MDRC, and graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in Anthropology. Her work has been supported by an American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (ASA DDRIG), a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and funding from multiple sources at Princeton, as well the Clements-DeGolyer Center at Southern Methodist University and the Portal to Texas History at the University of North Texas.