Welcome!  I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University.  My research spans legal studies and political economy (both international and comparative) and examines how law, politics, and economics interact to shape state-society relations. Regionally, my expertise is in the politics of the former Soviet Union. I am a mixed-methods scholar and take a fieldwork-intensive approach to data collection that includes survey research, interviews, ethnography, and experiments.

Current Research

My current research agenda centers on the intersection between politics, law, and economics in contemporary skilled labor migration. One project focuses on how the domestic and international legal contexts, in conjunction with an increase in remote and gig work, have shaped Russian migration since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A second line of inquiry investigates how remote work is shaping skilled labor migration more broadly -- and its corresponding economic and political impacts on local communities in receiving countries. A final project investigates political, legal, and economic push-pull factors among highly-skilled Iranian migrants in the West. These multi-article projects also tackle questions related to how individuals' views regarding democracy and citizenship shape their decisions related to migration, and the topic of individual-level support for democracy constitutes the third major focus of my research.

My book, Seeking a Corruption Equilibrium: Authoritarian Legality in Central Asia (status - R&R), examines how a major dilemma in authoritarian governance -- balancing political elites’ demands for rents against grassroots discontent with endemic corruption -- shapes citizen-state legal disputes in two Central Asian states following economic liberalization. Drawing from over 16 months of fieldwork in Kazakhstan, I find that former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev responded to waning popular support by introducing anti-corruption reforms and cracking down on officials' illicit behavior in some areas -- while preserving it in others. To do so, he turned to law and courts to manage, rather than eliminate, officials’ corrupt behavior. Focusing on property seizures, I show that channeling conflict over elites' corrupt behavior reduces collective action by victims, offers an improved outcome for some, and enforces minimal limits on officials' rent-seeking -- while also obfuscating and facilitating it. In short, turning to law and courts can facilitate a 'corruption equilibrium' – for a time. In neighboring Uzbekistan, economic liberalization adopted by the country's new president led to similar dynamics, but vulnerable citizens' appeals to international audiences at a critical juncture protected some from expropriation. My work suggests that in the long term, elevating legal institutions legitimizes them as forums for resolving citizen-state conflicts and fosters grassroots pressure for more fundamental institutional change, including more robust economic rights. Related work focuses on the cross-national measurement of judicial corruption in challenging political environments and its applications for policymakers interested in judicial reform. 

From 2017-2018, I was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. I completed my PhD in Political Science at the Ohio State University in 2017. Before coming to Ohio State, I earned an MA in Russian Studies at the European University at St. Petersburg and a BA in History from Grinnell College.