Welcome to my website! 

I am a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I research political violence, mass atrocity, human rights, and Southeast Asian politics. 

My dissertation project, Organizing the Revolutionary State: Governance and Mass Death in Democratic Kampuchea, focuses on governance during revolution in order to address famine deaths during the Cambodian Genocide.  Through this study, I present a logic of revolutionary governance to explain the variation in policy implementation, as well as construct a set of social factors that act as buffers against famine. This project builds on original data from over a year of fieldwork in Cambodia. It addresses the establishment and effects of collectivization in the Cambodian context. In doing so, I break down the policies that made up collectivization into their social and economic elements. What I find is that the social components of collectivization, practices that undermined family and communal ties, decreased the likelihood of population survival. 
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My research has been supported by the Department of Education through the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad, as well as the Mellon-Wisconsin fellowship, and UW-Madison’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Division of International Studies. 

Prior to my doctoral studies, I received an MA from the University of Chicago in International Relations, and a BA from Cornell University in Government and Asian Studies.  

The photo above was generously shared with me by an interview subject in Battambang, Cambodia