About me

I am an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Starting in fall 2025, I will be an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame in May of 2024.

My research focuses on migration, political-criminal violence, and democratic citizenship, examining how social identities shape political behavior in violent, unequal societies. To what extent do democracies include citizens and non-citizens in political and social life? I address this question by investigating how the political voices of marginalized groups affect intergroup discrimination and democratic accountability, primarily in Latin America. I combine fieldwork and text analysis with field and survey experiments to study how racial minorities and undocumented immigrants challenge stigma and mobilize citizens to hold politicians accountable for abusing the state’s coercive power.

My work has been published in Political Psychology, Party Politics, Legislative Studies Quarterly [2x], and Research and Politics, and is under advance contract with Cambridge University Press. It has also been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the American Political Science Association (APSA), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), and the Kellogg Institute, among others. I am also a 2023-2024 Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar, a USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar, and an APSA Political Psychology Distinguished Junior Scholar.