Thank you for visiting my webpage. I hold a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University and am a fellow with the Migrations Program at Cornell University, where I was also a postdoctoral fellow from 2023-2025. Sitting at the intersection of political economy, international political sociology, and law and society, my research uses a transnational lens to reveal how forms of state power such as border and migration controls and policing have been shaped by histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism.

As such, my work makes three central contributions: It theorizes the nexus between political economy and domestic and international security practices, develops a transnational methodology to understand the making of state capacity, and examines how states decide who can be a worthy member of their society.

I have published multiple articles and chapters in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Punishment & Society, and the Oxford Handbook of International Political Sociology and my work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service. It won two best paper awards as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2024 APSA Migration and Citizenship section thesis award. At Cornell, I was awarded the 2024 Postdoc Achievement Award for Excellence in Leadership.

My first book, Controlling Migrants: Vagrancy, Indentured Labor, and the Policing of Mobility in Germany, won the Oxford University Press Early Career Researcher First Book Award and is now under contract with OUP. The book examines the entangled histories of subnational-local and global-colonial mobility controls and develops a multi-scalar framework to theorize the making of contemporary migration control regimes. Through a case study of Germany it shows that to be able to control people as migrants, the German state relies on a set of legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities that are as much rooted in the policing of vagrants and Roma people at the parish level as they were influenced by the efforts to control colonized subjects. Ultimately this reveals how the expansion of migration controls and the making of German state capacity were driven by attempts to control foreign workers and to police the boundaries of belonging.

I have designed and taught classes on migration in the world, the politics of border controls, global political economy from below, the United Nations, and U.S. Foreign Policy.