Jim McQuaid is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Framingham State University, where he teaches courses in research methods, introduction to sociology, and death and dying. He received his Ph.D. from Boston University in 2013. His doctoral dissertation explored the rules underlying market interactions in the Massachusetts funeral market. His current research builds off of this work to explore the intersections of economic and cultural action, and he is in the process of building a data set that will allow him to study the mechanisms that connect buyers and sellers in funeral markets throughout the United States.