Welcome

I am a scholar of comparatve politics, studying state‑formation, contentious politics, and cleavage formation in postcolonial societies.

In my ongoing and completed research, I show that states in the Middle East and North Africa supply high schools and mosques unevenly and strategically to facilitate social control, creating compliant and demobilized citizenries. These processes, prevalent in nations with histories of nondemocratic rule, leave behind manufactured meritocracies, territorialized marginalizations, and, ironically, enduring political fault lines.

I empirically investigate contentious and otherwise mobilizational politics in such societies, seeking to understand how individuals can convert associational cooperation and mass coordination into observable political agency while being governed by states conducting policies of mass repression and indoctrination.

My dissertation, Fellahin into Frenchmen: Social Control and Educational Supply in the Postcolonial Maghreb, demonstrates that regimes in Tunisia and Morocco withheld secondary education from regions linked to colonial‑era rebellions.

Current and published research projects explore macro‑level processes in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey. My co‑authored article with H. E. Ceyhun in Mediterranean Politics analyzes how political polarization shapes religious identification in Turkey.

I am grateful to be advised by Amaney Jamal, Mark Beissinger, and Elizabeth Nugent.

I am on the 2025-2026 academic job market.