I am a Postdoctoral Associate at the Department of Political Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently, I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the Middle East Initiative Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School. I received my Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University in summer 2022. I am also a Junior Fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS).

 

My research interests include political communication, research methodology, Middle East politics, religion and law, economic development, and automated text analysis and machine learning. In my dissertation and book project, The Quest for Influence: Media Changes and Reform Politics in Saudi Arabia, I investigate how media innovations affect politics in autocratic regimes. I employ a range of research methods to analyze an array of largely unused digitized and traditional data.

 

My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the American Political Science Association, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Kellogg School of Management, and the Northwestern Graduate School, among others.  

 

Prior to my graduate studies, I was a Visiting Research Scholar in Anthropology at Duke University and a non-resident Fellow at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore. I received a BA, with distinction, from Duke University and an MA from Northwestern University's political science department. 

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A recent discussion of my latest article can be found here.

 

CV