I am an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Utah and a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative.
My research examines how authoritarian regimes use elections, inclusion, and information control to legitimize their rule—and how citizens respond. I work primarily on the Middle East and North Africa, with newer projects in East Asia. My interests span authoritarian politics & democratic erosion, gender & politics, electoral institutions, repression & surveillance, and public opinion & survey methods.
My work appears in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, and Politics & Gender, among other outlets. I co-lead the Global Surveillance and Censorship Scores (GSCS), a National Science Foundation-funded dataset measuring state censorship and surveillance worldwide. I am completing a book manuscript, To Rig the Rules or to Break the Rules: The Politics of Electoral Manipulation in Autocracies. My research has also been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the American Political Science Association, the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, the American University of Sharjah, the Project on Middle East Political Science, and Harvard's Middle East Initiative.
I am a co-founder of the Network on Gender, Politics, and Policy in the Middle East and North Africa (GPP-MENA). We organize annual Gender and Politics in the MENA Conference, which has convened scholars since 2019. Join our mailing list!
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics, with a minor in Arabic, from Washington University in St. Louis. I also spent a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo. I have conducted fieldwork in Algeria, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, the UAE, and South Korea.
My research examines how authoritarian regimes use elections, inclusion, and information control to legitimize their rule—and how citizens respond. I work primarily on the Middle East and North Africa, with newer projects in East Asia. My interests span authoritarian politics & democratic erosion, gender & politics, electoral institutions, repression & surveillance, and public opinion & survey methods.
My work appears in the American Political Science Review, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, and Politics & Gender, among other outlets. I co-lead the Global Surveillance and Censorship Scores (GSCS), a National Science Foundation-funded dataset measuring state censorship and surveillance worldwide. I am completing a book manuscript, To Rig the Rules or to Break the Rules: The Politics of Electoral Manipulation in Autocracies. My research has also been supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the American Political Science Association, the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, the American University of Sharjah, the Project on Middle East Political Science, and Harvard's Middle East Initiative.
I am a co-founder of the Network on Gender, Politics, and Policy in the Middle East and North Africa (GPP-MENA). We organize annual Gender and Politics in the MENA Conference, which has convened scholars since 2019. Join our mailing list!
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics, with a minor in Arabic, from Washington University in St. Louis. I also spent a semester abroad at the American University in Cairo. I have conducted fieldwork in Algeria, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, the UAE, and South Korea.
