I am a Fellow at the Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs and a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. I completed my B.A. at the University of Minnesota in Political Science with a minor in Russian, where I graduated summa cum laude in 2014. Starting in September, I will be a Research Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan.
My current research examines the effects of foreign sponsorship on the durability of authoritarian client regimes in the postwar period. My dissertation and book project seeks to explain puzzling variation in the impact of foreign support on client regime survival between Western patrons and their Soviet counterpart. In particular, I focus on the divergent effects of foreign sponsorship on client coup prevention strategies and military loyalty. My research has been published or is forthcoming in World Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, and the Washington Post.
More broadly, my research interests include the politics of authoritarian rule, civil-military relations, comparative democratization, Soviet foreign policy, and the international politics of insurgency and counterinsurgency. In addition to my own data collection for my dissertation, I have been involved in several long-term data collection projects, including the revolutionary regimes dataset with Steven Levitsky and Lucan Ahmad Way, the ongoing State Genealogy project with Seva Gunitsky, and a (very) new project on the origins of military organizations with Lucan Ahmad Way, Dan Slater, Steven Levitsky, and Jean Lachapelle.
A recent copy of my curriculum vitae can be found here.
