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.
My research focuses on political behavior, political economy and party politics. My book project, tentatively titled Out of Reach: Place, Mobility, and the Radical Right examines the crucial role that residential choices and constraints play in shaping contemporary political conflicts and growing support for radical right parties, the most profound political realignment of our time. Residential mobility – having control and choice over where one lives – carries wide-ranging implications, from social mobility and economic security to overall quality of life. In rich postindustrial democracies characterized by widening spatial inequalities in opportunity and prosperity, its influence on citizens’ lives and well-being has grown ever more consequential. Yet we still know very little about its political dimensions. Out of Reach takes up this task. To do so, the book first illuminates how the flexible knowledge economy places citizens in a double bind: while liberalized labor markets and weakened social safety nets place heavy demands on individual mobility, skyrocketing housing and living costs in high-opportunity areas powerfully constrain it, rendering access to such places and the opportunities they offer increasingly out of reach.
Uncovering the structural underpinnings of mobility constraints, Out of Reach then traces the profound ways in which they shape social identities, societal attitudes, and political choices. By generating a deep sense of what it calls stuckness, mobility constraints serve as a central lens through which individuals interpret themselves, their prospects, and the social and political environments they inhabit. Drawing on analyses of longitudinal local-level data, extensive ethnographic research, original surveys, and conjoint experiments across two diverging rich democracies, France and Finland, the book explains how the distinct material and symbolic grievances stuckness evokes render the radical right – with its protectionist, ethnonationalist agenda and populist rhetoric about the “cosmopolitan” elites and the overlooked “ordinary” citizens – uniquely placed to capitalize on these dynamics. This research 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.