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 political and economic forces reshape institutions and the coalitions that sustain them. I am particularly interested in how collective mobilization, economic competition, conflict, and technological change alter incentives to defend the status quo or support institutional change.

Methodologically, I use formal theory and causal inference to analyze newly collected data, often from archival sources. I frequently study these questions in historical settings, including slavery and colonial rule in the British Empire.

Slave Revolts and Emancipation
Revise & Resubmit, American Political Science Review
How can collective mobilization by politically excluded groups induce elites to support institutional reform?

Geopolitics and Institutional Change
When do geopolitical shocks and economic competition lead incumbents to support institutional change?

Temples and Tablets
How do organizations shape the adoption and diffusion of transformative technologies?

My research has been supported by a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and has received the 2025 Sage Best Paper Prize from APSA's Comparative Politics section and the 2025 David Brian Robertson Prize from the Politics & History section. 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.

Semester-long visiting appointments (2025)
Visiting Scholar, Department of Economics, Yale University
Visiting Scholar, Becker Friedman Institute, University of Chicago 

Selected invited presentations, 2025-26
Duke, Yale, Northwestern, Brown, NYU, Barcelona

I serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Peace Research and the council of APSA's Political Economy organized section. At King's, I co-lead the Historical Political Economy research group, which brings together scholars using history to investigate questions in political economy.

I studied applied mathematics at Harvard (BA) and, before entering academia, worked as a consultant at Bain & Company in New York. I subsequently completed my DPhil/PhD in economics at Oxford and held the Bevil Mabey Fellowship in Economics at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge before joining King’s.