Welcome! I am a Ford Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I received my PhD in Government from Harvard University in May 2017.
My research focuses on comparative politics and historical political economy. My scholarship is organized around three distinct research agendas: (1) the consequences of migration and cultural diversity for long-run development; (2) the effects of violence on bystanders; and (3) the relationship between slave raiding and state building. I ask whether group identities shape preferences for formal and informal governance institutions; how cultural diversity affects economic performance; and what mechanisms connect violence in the distant past to contemporary political outcomes. I draw on extensive archival and field research and employ quantitative analysis of observational and experimental data as well as narrative evidence. My regional focus is on Europe and Eurasia.
My book, Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe (2024, Cambridge University Press, Studies in Comparative Politics Series), examines the long-run effects of forced migration in the aftermath of World War II in Poland and West Germany, synthesizing several decades of micro-level data. I show that the rupture of social ties and increased cultural diversity in affected communities not only decreased social cohesion, but also shored up the demand for state-provided resources, which facilitated the accumulation of state capacity. Over time, areas that received a larger and more diverse influx of migrants achieved higher levels of entrepreneurship, education, and income. The book challenges common assumptions about the costs of forced displacement and cultural diversity and proposes a novel mechanism linking wars to state-building. It received the 2025 APSA Merze Tate – Elinor Ostrom Outstanding Book Award and the 2025 APSA European Politics and Society Section Best Book Award and was shortlisted for the 2025 APSA Comparative Politics Section Luebbert Best Book.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Political Science Review, British Journal of Political Science, Annual Review of Political Science , The Journal of Politics, World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of International Relations, and Nationalities Papers.
In 2021, I was awarded Carolina de Miguel Moyer Young Scholar Award, presented annually by Council of European Studies at Columbia University to a young scholar who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to the interdisciplinary study of Europe.
I am on the editorial board and regular contributor to Broadstreet Blog, dedicated to interdisciplinary research of historical political economy. I am also on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy (JHPE). I have contributed articles to Foreign Affairs, Monkey Cage at the Washington Post, National Interest, Transitions Online, Arms Control Today, Belarus Digest, and other media.