Welcome!  I am an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University, where I study and teach about comparative politics and the political economy of development.  I am jointly appointed in Northeastern’s Political Science and International Affairs programs, and I hold an affiliation with Global Resilience Institute and Asian Studies program.  I am a member of the GETTING-Plurality Research Network, part of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at Harvard University.  My research and teaching interests focus on democratic erosion and resilience, civil society, public service delivery, and the ethics and politics of global philanthropy. 

My first book, How NGOs Shape the State:  Informal Institutions and Public Service Provision in India (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press) examines the impact of NGOs on state service provision in India, focusing especially on the education sector. I have also published articles on the intellectual history of the civil society concept and its relevance to empirical studies of development and on the politics of Fair Trade, and currently have new work under review on NGO-state partnerships, democratic gatekeeping, and institutional change during the British industrial revolution. I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on comparative politics, democratic erosion, globalization, and global philanthropy.  My writing has appeared in the Oxford Handbook series, the Sociology of Development, and the Boston Review.

Prior to Northeastern, I held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society and was a Visiting Assistant Instructor in Government and Asian Studies at Bowdoin College. Previously, I was a Democracy Doctoral Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School.  I hold a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Swarthmore College.  Before graduate school, I spent five years working in the non-profit and social enterprise sectors in the fields of international development, Fair Trade, and conflict resolution.