About me

I am a political scientist and British Academy International Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester. I received my PhD in Political Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am on the job market in 2026–27.

I study political economy and comparative politics, with a focus on elites and business-government relations. My research asks when and how concentrated economic power translates into political power, how that power is sustained, constrained, and transformed, and what consequences it has for governance, policy, and politics. I am particularly interested in how extremely wealthy individuals interact with politicians, public officials, citizens, institutions, and one another to exercise political influence.

My book project, supported by a British Academy International Fellowship, develops a relational theory of oligarchic power, arguing that it depends not only on oligarchs’ wealth, but on the interaction between oligarchs’ characteristics and the broader configurations of relationships through which oligarchs become embedded across political institutions. Drawing on Ukraine since 2014, I build an original relational data infrastructure capturing often hidden connections among oligarchs and political elites, and use it to examine how these networks are structured, how they shape policymaking and reform, and how they change in response to institutional and geopolitical shocks.

My research has been published or conditionally accepted for publication in the American Political Science Review and Europe-Asia Studies, and has been generously supported by the British Academy, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the Smith Richardson Foundation, among others. It has also received best paper awards from UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of Political Science, the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Association for the Study of Nationalities.

For more information, see the links on this site or feel free to get in touch.