Welcome! I am currently an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Ethnic Studies at the University of Utah. Previously, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow with the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University, and received my PhD from the Department of Government at Cornell University. My research interests lie in comparative politics, specifically on identity, inequality, and citizenship, with a regional focus on Latin America.

You can find my CV here and read more about my current book project here, as well as my other on-going research here.

In brief, my current book project leverages a phenomenon of racial reclassification in Brazil to shed light on the processes of identity politicization. I leverage a newfound tendency for Brazilians to capitalize on fluid racial boundaries to reclassify towards blackness. I argue that these patterns are the unintended consequences of recent state-led efforts to better incorporate lower-class citizens through educational expansion. I build and test this argument with multiple methods, including in-depth interviews, panel analyses, and an originally designed survey and survey experiments. This project is based on my doctoral dissertation, which was supported by the National Science and Fulbright-Hays Foundations, and was awarded the 2020 Best Dissertation Prize from the Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science of Association.