Hi! I am a Preceptor at the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard University, and an associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

I am interested in how states shape beliefs about national identity. My dissertation research on the Soviet Union examines how Soviet cultural institutions helped to build national groups that were imagined not only to be strong or weak, but also loyal or hostile to the multi-national communist project. I focus on the role of campaigns to “liquidate illiteracy” amongst the adult Soviet population in the 1920s, and on the emergence of national cultural intelligentsias - writers, artists, scholars, and other creative professionals - in the 1980s. My work relies on quantitative data collected from Soviet archives as well as qualitative primary sources and original interviews..

My other projects examine the formation of authoritarian organs for administrating cultural life, the dynamics of mass purges and forced resettlement, elite politics in personalist authoritarian regimes, democratization in 19th century Britain, and the effectiveness of new strategies for teaching social science writing.

I also work on racial disparities in health using large-scale randomized control trials with a team of researchers at Boston Medical Center. Our work focuses on preconception health and health education amongst black and African American women here in the United States.

I am enthusiastic about teaching, and developed and taught original courses and workshops on introductory comparative politics, the practice and profession of science across different disciplines, national identity, the fundamentals of running a clinical trial, the arts and culture in authoritarian settings, and social science writing.

Before coming to Harvard, I worked in simulation and model-based forecasting for a small defense contracting firm.

You can learn more about my research and teaching, and find my CV and contact information, in the other sections of this site.