I am a Senior Lecturer of Political Science at NYU Abu Dhabi.
My research is in comparative and historical political economy. I study how political institutions, economic geography, and the distribution of de facto power shape democratization, taxation, and state capacity — with much of my empirical work drawing on the history of the United States, including the antebellum South, secession, Reconstruction, and the long aftermath of disenfranchisement.
Recent projects use large historical administrative records and computational text methods to revisit long-standing questions, including new full-census estimates of U.S. Civil War mortality and the measurement of religiosity at scale.