I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Politics and Public Affairs Department at Denison University. Previously, I was an NSF-funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Society Project. I am a political scientist comparatively studying authoritarian politics, with a substantive focus on affective polarization and democratic backsliding, and a methodological focus on computational and experimental analyses. My research and/or writing has appeared in diverse outlets, including The Washington Post and peer-reviewed Democratization, Computation, and Ethnopolitics. More information on my background and research can be found on my website and on my Google Scholar profile.

I am Distinguished Professor at the Department of Political Science at UC Davis. I have published in the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics. I am the author of A Unified Theory of Party Competition (Cambridge Press, 2005; co-authored with Samuel Merrill, III, and Bernard Grofman), and of American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective (2020, with Noam Gidron and Will Horne), part of the CUP Elements Series in American Politics.  

I am a first-year student at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. I am majoring in Politics and Public Affairs and plan to attend law school upon completing my undergraduate degree. I am deeply interested in politics at all levels and work part-time at the Ohio House of Representatives. Polarization is a topic of great interest to me, and I have always been drawn to studying and combating it. I greatly appreciate the honor of serving as an assistant on this project, and am excited to dedicate time to serving Polarization Consortium.