Harel Shapira is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his BA from the University of Chicago and his PhD from Columbia University. Shapira uses long- term ethnographic research to understand right- wing politics and gun culture in contemporary America. He is the author of Waiting for José: The Minutemen's Pursuit of America (Princeton University Press, 2013) and the coeditor of Gun Studies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Politics, Policy, and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2019, with Jennifer Carlson and Kristin Goss). His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation as well as the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and his writing has been featured in numerous outlets, including The New York Times and The New Republic. He was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2015 and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in 2021.