About

Thank you for visiting my webpage. I hold a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University, am a fellow with the Migrations Program at Cornell University, where I was also a postdoctoral fellow from 2023-2025, and a Research Associate with the Center for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex. Besides my academic background, I have 5+ years of working in intergovernmental negotiations on sustainable development at the United Nations.

Research

My research is motivated by three central questions: What drove the development of state capacity and processes of state-making in Europe? How did laws, policies, and institutions at the local and colonial levels interact in shaping contemporary policing and migration control practices in Western Europe and the United States? And how do societies decide who is worthy of membership? To answer these questions I combine archival methods, policy analysis, and interviews to develop a multi-scalar methodology that connects developments at subnational-local and transnational-global level.

My research has been published in International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Punishment & Society, and South Atlantic Quarterly and has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the German Academic Exchange Service. It won two best paper awards as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2024 APSA Migration and Citizenship section thesis award. At Cornell, I was awarded the 2024 Postdoc Achievement Award for Excellence in Leadership.

My first book, Controlling Migrants: Vagrancy, Indentured Labor, and the Policing of Mobility in Germany, is under contract with Oxford University Press and won OUP’s Early Career Researcher First Book Award. Drawing on 15 months of archival research in nine archives in Germany and the United Kingdom, Controlling Migrants advances a new understanding of state formation in Europe by theorizing processes of state making through the prism of mobility controls. It asks why and how states developed the capacities to categorize some people as undesirable and to target and exclude them—a question that has rarely been more relevant. Through a case-study of Germany, the book argues that migration controls emerged out of the entangled histories of legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities developed to police the racialized boundaries of belonging and control people as workers. It further shows how these capacities were refined and sharpened as they moved back and forth between the parish and the colony.

Teaching

I have designed and taught classes on migration in the world, the politics of border controls, global political economy from below, the United Nations, and U.S. Foreign Policy.