Welcome!

I am an Associate Professor of International Studies at Pepperdine University. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA and was a pre-doctoral research fellow in the Belfer Center’s Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

With a focus on the Middle East and North Africa, my research examines the political legacies of war, identity politics and political party development in weak states, and the role of civil society in post-war contexts.

My research has been funded by a Belfer Center Middle East Initiative (MEI) fellowship, an Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) Herb York Global Security fellowship, a Project on Middle East Political Science (POMEPS) TRE grant, and the Department of Education's Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) summer fellowship.