I am a writer and scholar whose work explores the intersection of state and capital power.
I am the incoming Gerhard Casper Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford's Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University as a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and NSF Graduate Research Fellow.
What explains patterns of policing and incarceration in the world's largest democracies? My research advances a new answer: police do not only impose social order, but they enforce economic order. In developing economies, states deploy coercive and carceral institutions to discipline the labor on which production and extraction depend.
I use mixed-methods to study these topics, leveraging large-scale administrative data, open-source environmental, geospatial, and text data, web-scraped human rights records, colonial archival materials, causal inference designs, in-depth interviews, and participant observation in the field.
My research has been published in the Annual Review of Political Science. My broader agenda contends with the coercive consequences of economic transformations, especially for labor, in varied sites including data centers in the U.S.
As a playwright, I explore the interpersonal consequences of life under state power, and the ways people break and build beyond it. My plays have been supported and developed by the Sewanee Writers Conference (2026) and the Lambda Literary Writers Retreat (2026). Most recently, The Dolphin Pod Swims Underwater at the Community Pool received a staged reading in Manhattan. Other works have been produced in Michigan and California, and I have received the Hopwood Award for Drama. I am currently the Associate Producer at Playwrights Foundation.
I grew up in a Detroit exurb and received my B.A. in Political Science and Environmental Studies from the University of Michigan, where I was a first-generation college student. I talk about these experiences on the Imagine a World podcast, and occasionally write about them.