Welcome

I am a scholar of comparative politics, studying state‑formation, contentious politics, and cleavage formation in Africa and Asia, with a primary regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa. I am also an AALIMS junior fellow. In Fall 2026, I will be starting a Research Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Toulouse. In recent months, I have also started a blog which you can read here .

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

My dissertation, Fellahin into Frenchmen: Social Control and Educational Supply in the Postcolonial Maghreb, explores the politicized supply of secondary education in postcolonial Morocco, Tunisia and West Africa. My dissertation features comprehensive geolocations of schools built in Tunisia, as well as originally collected geolocated event data, and an original nationall representative survey (N=1,0004) respondents. My dissertation substantiates the claim that political process, and secondary school expansions in particular, selectively disseminated status and hierarchy in the postcolonial Maghreb, instantiating an enduring cleavage structure consistent with downstream behaviors including electoral variation and protest mobilizaiton.

I am grateful to be advised by Amaney Jamal, Mark Beissinger, and Elizabeth Nugent. My research has been generously funded by Princeton's Bobst Center, the Princeton Multicenter Grant, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Affairs (PIIRS), and the Princeton Data Driven Social Science Center.