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.

Sitting at the intersection of political economy, international political sociology, and law and society, my research uses a transnational lens to reveal the entangled local-colonial histories of contemporary migration control, policing, and citizenship in Western Europe and the United States. My work further theorizes how the development of these capacities shaped processes of state making and how societies decide who is worthy of membership.

I have published multiple articles and chapters in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, International Political Sociology, Punishment & Society, and South Atlantic Quarterly and my work 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 Germany and the United Kingdom, the book advances a new understanding of the institutionalization of contemporary migration control. 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. Focusing on Germany, the book argues that “migrant illegality” is historically produced through the entanglement of local mobility controls, colonial governance, racial politics, and labor policies. As such, Controlling Migrants reveals how the attempts to categorize, control, and police people at the subnational-local and transnational-colonial levels led to the formation of contemporary migration control regimes. It further helps us understand how the construction of the figure of the illegal migrant operates through laws, administrative categories, and enforcement action.

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.