Hello and welcome! I’m currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I also serve as Faculty Director for the Middle East Studies Program. I’m also a faculty fellow with the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS). I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Government at the University of Texas at Austin in August 2015, held a post-doctoral fellowship at the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School during the 2015-2016 academic year, and from 2015 to 2019 I was on the faculty at the University of Louisville. You can download my current C.V. here.

I’m a comparativist by training with a regional specialization in the Middle East, but I have also begun to range more widely in order to study the questions that interest me. Substantively, I am interested in religion and politics, non-democratic regimes and oppositions, social service provision, and political violence. My first book, Winning Hearts and Votes: Social Services and the Islamist Political Advantage, was published by Cornell University Press in 2019 and won the APSA Middle East Section’s “Best Book by a First Time Author” award. My second book, Protection at the Margins: How the Catholic Church Shielded Communities from Populist Violence in the Philippine Drug War, co-authored with David Buckley, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in the second half of 2026. You can check out my research page to see more about my published and in-the-pipeline projects.