I am a writer and scholar whose work explores the intersection of state and capital power.​

 

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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. 

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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 protect capital interests and discipline the labor that makes extraction possible.

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I use mixed-methods to study these topics, leveraging large-scale administrative data, open-source environmental and geospatial data, web-scraped human rights records, archival colonial materials, machine learning, causal inference designs, in-depth interviews, and participant observation in the field.

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My research has been published in the Annual Review of Political Science and I am affiliated with the Poverty and Governance lab and the Inclusive Democracy and Development lab.​​

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As a playwright, I am drawn to the relational and interpersonal consequences of life under state power and how people break and build beyond it. My plays have been produced across Michigan and California and I have received the Hopwood Award for Drama. Currently, I am a Lambda Literary Fellow, and my newest play, "The Dolphin Pod Swims Underwater at the Community Pool," is being developed at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

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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.