Hi 👋

I am a PhD Candidate and Adjunct Instructor in the Department of Government at American University and a junior fellow with the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS). I am on the 2026–27 academic job market.

I study state-society relations, with an emphasis on religious, ethnic, and national identity: what states and parties do to the identities they govern and compete over, and how those identities respond in public opinion and political behavior. My work spans religion and the state in the Middle East and North Africa, the impact of radical-right parties in Europe, and ethnic exclusion and conflict around the world. Across these areas, I ask how institutional context shapes whether the same move is absorbed or backfires. I pursue these questions through various methods: collecting original data, linking public surveys to their respondents' political context, designing survey experiments, and measuring political text with language models.

My dissertation, State vs. Faith, examines state-led secularization campaigns and the religious backlash they can provoke. Its three papers ask how efforts to regulate, suppress, or recast religion can end up strengthening the very religious politics they target.

I am currently working with Dr. David Lublin on institutions and ethnic-party support, Dr. Elizabeth Suhay on meritocratic values across immigrant generations, and Dr. Sharan Grewal on radical-right effects on Muslim minority opinion in Europe.