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 will defend my PhD in August 2026. 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 started a blog on Substack exploring themes related to my scholarly interests, 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 education in postcolonial Morocco, Tunisia and West Africa. For my dissertation I collected a range of data, available to political scientits for the first time including the comprehensive geolocations of schools built in Tunisia since 1881 supplied to me by the nation's Ministry of Education (6,027), and an original nationally representative survey (N=1,004) survey study in Tunisia. The study 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.