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

I study the international and domestic politics of statebuilding and state capacity. My scholarship examines the effect of international actors on state development, the historical and domestic determinants of state development, and the consequences of international statebuilding.

My first book, Crippling Leviathan: How Foreign Subversion Weakens the State, is available from Cornell University Press. My research has also been published or is forthcoming in journals such as 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, APSA’s European Politics and Society Section Best Article Prize, Perry World House‘s Emerging Scholar Global Policy Prize, and honorable mention for best book from APSA’s Foreign Policy Section.

I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and my B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego.  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.