Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Government at American University. I study authoritarian governance, public opinion and participation, and information control, with a regional focus on China.
My research examines how autocrats exert control and cultivate conformity among societal actors, both domestically and internationally. One line of work investigates how autocrats manage public grievances to sustain legitimacy without ceding control—and the implications for public participation. Another focuses on authoritarian foreign influence operations, including transnational digital repression. Methodologically, I use qualitative fieldwork, surveys, experiments, and computational tools to explore these questions.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming at Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Science Research and Methods. My dissertation on authoritarian responsiveness and citizen participation received the 2023 Best Dissertation Award in the area of Information Technology and Politics by the American Political Science Association, 2024 Best Dissertation Award by the Western Political Science Association, and the Best Faculty Poster Award at 2023 Society for Political Methodology Summer Meeting.
I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2022 and was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar (2022-2024) at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. My email is [email protected].
My research examines how autocrats exert control and cultivate conformity among societal actors, both domestically and internationally. One line of work investigates how autocrats manage public grievances to sustain legitimacy without ceding control—and the implications for public participation. Another focuses on authoritarian foreign influence operations, including transnational digital repression. Methodologically, I use qualitative fieldwork, surveys, experiments, and computational tools to explore these questions.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming at Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, and Political Science Research and Methods. My dissertation on authoritarian responsiveness and citizen participation received the 2023 Best Dissertation Award in the area of Information Technology and Politics by the American Political Science Association, 2024 Best Dissertation Award by the Western Political Science Association, and the Best Faculty Poster Award at 2023 Society for Political Methodology Summer Meeting.
I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University in 2022 and was a Postdoctoral Research Scholar (2022-2024) at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center. My email is [email protected].