I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. I received my PhD in Political Science at Stanford in 2017, and my MA in Economics at Stanford in 2015.

I am a scholar of political economy and political institutions working in the traditional subfields of both Comparative Politics and American Politics. My research is broadly interested in how elites respond to dramatic economic and institutional changes. I'm interested in the effects of these changes on elite persistence and the strategies that elites employ to contend with potential disruptions to their power. I study a diverse set of historical time periods and country contexts including the Industrial Revolution in Britain, the enfranchisement of Black people in the U.S., and contemporary U.S. election administration. I am interested in quantitative methods, and I have a particular interest in causal inference in the context of observational research, as well as natural language processing using large corpuses of historical and historiographical text.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Duke Endowment, the Alma Ostrom and Leah Hopkins Awan Civic Education Fund, the Economic History Association, the Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences and the Stanford Europe Center.

At Duke, I teach the Scope and Methods course targeted at first semester, first year graduate students. The course provides an introduction to the scientific study of politics, including both the development of theory and the process of drawing causal inferences from evidence seeking to evaluate those theories. I also teach an undergraduate seminar (excitingly) entitled Political, Social and Economic Institutions that introduces students to the mechanics of specific institutions; theories of institutional origin, evolution and change; and asks students to engineer their own institution to solve a real-world problem that matters to them. Following my personal interest in criminal justice reform, I have taught as an instructor for accredited undergraduate courses at San Quentin Prison in California, and Turney Industrial Complex in Tennessee.

I previously studied Economics, Latin American Studies, and Math at New York University where I received my BA in 2007. I also worked as a Research Assistant in the Economic Studies and the Global Economy & Development Departments at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.