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 state formation, my research uses a transnational lens to reveal how contemporary security practices and forms of state power such as border and migration controls and policing have been shaped by histories of colonialism and efforts to govern workers.

My book project examines the entangled histories of subnational-local and global-colonial mobility controls and develops a multi-scalar framework to analyze the making of contemporary border controls. 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.

A second project I am currently co-developing, and which is supported through a joint Cornell University and King’s College seed grant, seeks to broaden the geographic scope of the post-colonial social science literature by thinking about the legacies of colonialism beyond the Anglosphere.

Thirdly, I co-authored multiple articles focused on the political economy of international security. Often treated in isolation, these articles instead examine how contemporary security practices are central to the functioning of our global economy.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Carnegie Council and has won multiple best paper awards as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2024 APSA Migration and Citizenship section best dissertation award. At Cornell, I was awarded the 2024 Postdoc Achievement Award for Excellence in Leadership.

I have 5+ years in policy analysis and multi-stakeholder engagement at the United Nations and am currently working as a policy researcher and speechwriter in the office of the President of Johns Hopkins University. 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.