Welcome. I am the Klein Family Presidential Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

I study the international and domestic politics of statebuilding, sovereignty, and state development. My scholarship examines international efforts to undermine state authority, the historical and domestic determinants of state development, and the domestic politics of international statebuilding. My newest work focuses on dependent territories — non-sovereign territories with subordinate constitutional status.

My book, Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State, is available from Cornell University Press. My research has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and International Organization, and my policy writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs and the Irregular Warfare Initiative. My work has  received the American Political Science Association’s Helen Dwight Reid (now Merze Tate) award, the APSA European Politics and Society Section’s Best Article Prize, Perry World House’s Emerging Scholar Global Policy Prize, the APSA Politics and History Section’s Mary Parker Follett Award, and honorable mention for best book from APSA’s Foreign Policy Section.

I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn, I was Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, the Lightning Scholar at Penn’s Perry World House, and a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.