Welcome!
I am an Assistant Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and core faculty in the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University. Previously, I held a Democracy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Cornell University in 2020.
My research focuses on political behavior, political economy and party politics, primarily in rich postindustrial democracies. My book project, tentatively titled Stuck: Residential Constraints and the Radical Right, articulates a novel theory of residential constraints as a fundamental force that underpins electoral realignment and growing support for radical right parties in wealthy postindustrial democracies. Despite growing interest in the various ways in which housing markets, spatial inequalities, and residential choices influence contemporary divides in political preferences across place and space, scholars have yet to consider the crucial role that residential mobility constraints plays in shaping social and place-based identities and political choices.
This is a matter that calls for urgent attention, not least because residential choices and constraints are inextricably linked to the transition Fordist to flexible knowledge economies that simultaneously place strong emphasis on individual mobility while conversely powerfully constraining it. Not only has this economic restructuring rendered social safety nets weaker and “flexible,” non-standard employment increasingly commonplace, but it has also deeply altered the spatial distribution of economic activity, wealth, and prosperity, deepening inequalities within countries. In such circumstances, individuals’ capacity to respond to changing circumstances and economic shocks - and by extension their economic well-being and (in)security - thus heavily depend on their residential mobility. At the same time, the skyrocketing of housing and living costs in prosperous high-opportunity agglomerations serves to lock out large numbers of individuals out of such places and the opportunities they provide. By generating a deep sense of what I call “stuckness” and inability to respond to these conditions, this dynamic serves as a central lens through which individuals make sense of themselves and the changing social and political world around them. As such, it carries with it important symbolic meaning and socio-psychological consequences, triggering concern over social recognition, status anxiety, and stagnation. In so doing, it makes the radical right - with its protectionist, nationalist agenda and populist rhetoric on the rootless and mobile “cosmopolitan” elites and the “ordinary” populations who are “ignored” or “left-behind” - particularly well-placed to capitalize on the economic and cultural concerns generated by this dynamic.
To make this claim, my research uses mixed methods that combine analyses of original surveys, fine-grained local-level data, and extensive qualitative fieldwork and participant observation in selected European countries. It has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Embassy of France in the United States, the Thanks to Scandinavia Foundation and the Cornell Institute for European Studies.