I am a Professor in the Department of Political Economy at King’s College London. My research lies at the intersection of political economy and comparative politics, and examines how conflict, collective mobilization, and economic interests shape political and economic institutions. Methodologically, I use formal theory and causal inference to analyze newly collected data, often from archival sources.

My current research examines why political and economic elites sometimes support the dismantling of institutions from which they have long benefited. In a series of papers on British slavery and abolition, I study how slave resistance, economic competition, and geopolitical shocks changed elite incentives and contributed to the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation. More broadly, I study how popular mobilization and conflict affect democratization, political participation, and institutional development.

My research has been supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship. My work has been published in journals including the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Political Science Research and Methods.

I am on the editorial board of the Journal of Peace Research and the council of APSA's Political Economy organized section. I co-lead the Historical Political Economy (HPE) research group at King's. I currently teach courses on causal inference and historical political economy.

Before joining King’s, I was the Bevil Mabey Fellow in Economics at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. I studied applied mathematics at Harvard (BA) and economics at Oxford (DPhil/PhD). Before my PhD, I was an associate consultant in the New York City offices of Bain & Company.