In 2016, I graduated from Macalester College, a small liberal arts college in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, I pursued a double major in Political Science and Sociology with a minor in History. During my undergraduate years, I spent a semester at Leiden University College in The Hague. I credit both of these experiences with broadening my horizons and encouraging me to look at all politics through a comparative lens.
After graduating from Macalester, I spent two years at Cornell University’s Sociology PhD program. While there, I began taking courses in the Government department under Tom Pepinsky, Andy Mertha, and Nicolas van de Walle, my research interests began closing in on where they are today, and I realized it was time to transfer into a program in Political Science.
In Fall 2018, I enrolled in the Charles and Louise Travers Department of Political Science at UC Berkeley, where I am currently working under my advisor, Kevin O’Brien, and my other committee members: Alison Post, Jennifer Bussell, and Andrew Little. My Master’s Thesis, a milestone of the PhD program, was published in Asian Survey, and generated a spinoff chapter which appears in the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship. You can read more about these on the “publications” page.
While my academic interests focus on Chinese domestic politics, I am also fascinated by the politics of public transportation and urban planning more generally. My travels around Europe, the US, and China exposed me to a world of contrasts: subway booms and transit death spirals; housing bubbles and housing shortages; bicycle highways and bicycle gutters. I don’t have any ongoing publications on these topics, though I do feature them in my lectures. If you’re interested in collaborating on one of these topics—or if you just want to chat about Strong Towns and gadgetbahns—feel free to reach out to me anytime.
