I AM AN EMERGING POLITICAL SCIENTIST STUDYING contentious AND CARCERAL politics.

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Welcome! 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.

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What explains the high levels of policing and incarceration in the world's largest democracies? In my research, 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 corpuses of media reports, archival documents, historical 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 the British system of indenture has long-run impacts.

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As a graduate student, I am affiliated with the Poverty and Governance lab and the Inclusive Democracy and Development lab. I received support from 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, and Stanford Impact Labs. Beyond research, I co-lead Stanford's Jail and Prison Education Project where I am passionate about community-based teaching and pedagogy.

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I believe in using political science for political struggle around the world. Outside of academia, I communicate with non-academic audiences through storytelling: as a writer of features 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. 

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