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I am a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University where I am a Knight-Hennessy Scholar and National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. My work centers contentious and carceral politics.

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What explains the high levels of policing and incarceration in the world's largest democracies? In my work, I aim to understand how states use police power for the protection of capital interests. To do so, I explore the extractive determinants of deploying coercive and carceral institutions both historically and today. This research is based in India and the Americas. 

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I use observational empirical methods to track state and police violence alongside extractive projects. To study these topics, I use large-scale administrative data, open-source environmental data, webscraped data on human rights abuses, large-N data from the corpora of media reports, geolocated archival maps, and in-depth interviews in fieldwork. ​In my dissertation project, I uncover policing as an integral part of the plantation economy in Assam, India where labor control drives state violence.

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My work has been published in the Annual Review of Political Science and is supported by the King Center for Global Development, the Stanford Center for South Asia, the Stanford Center for Latin American Studies, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford Impact Labs, and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. I am affiliated with the Poverty and Governance lab and the Inclusive Democracy and Development lab.

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I believe in using political science for political struggle around the world. Beyond research, I co-lead Stanford's Jail and Prison Education Project where I am passionate about community-based teaching and pedagogy. Outside of academia, I communicate with non-academic audiences through storytelling: as a writer of nonfiction and plays, and through discussion of my work on the Imagine a World podcast. 

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I originally hail from a Detroit exurb, after which I received my B.A in Environmental Studies and B.A. in Political Science from the University of Michigan, where I was a first-generation college student. ​