Contact Information:
Department of Political Science,
University of Washington
101 Gowen Hall, Box 353530,
Seattle, WA 98195
Hello! I am an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington. Before joining the University of Washington faculty, I was a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Nuffield College and the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Oxford. I hold a Ph.D. in Political Science (2018) and an MA in Economics (2014) from Duke University. You can read my CV here.
My main research interests involve comparative political economy and historical political economy, focusing on the causes and consequences of economic, social, and ethnoreligious inequality. In particular, I am interested in (i) microfoundations of individual preferences for redistribution and social policies, as well as the distributive and political impact of these preferences, (ii) distributive politics in developing countries; and (iii) the historical political economy of nation-making and state-building in diverse societies. I employ various methodological approaches, including formal modeling, survey and laboratory experiments, archival research, and quasi-experimental observational methods using original data. My research is concentrated in advanced industrialized countries and the Middle East, especially Turkey and the Ottoman Empire.
My papers have been published or are forthcoming in the Journal of Politics, World Politics, the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, the Journal of Historical Political Economy, and West European Politics. I am a Faculty Fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS), UW Near and Middle Eastern Studies, UW Middle East Center, UW Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, and UW Center for Environmental Politics. I’m also on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy.
My research has won discipline-wide awards including APSA MENA Politics Section Best Article Award (2023), Weber Best Paper in Religion and Politics Award by the APSA Religion & Politics Section (2024), Best Paper on Social and Economic Inequality Award by the Inequality & Class Section of the American Political Science Association (2024).
Besides my research, I teach courses on comparative politics, economic inequality, Middle East politics, and geospatial methods.
Also, I am a big fan of Turkish pop music, especially 90s pop. Multiple media outlets have covered my research and thoughts on popular songs, economy, and politics: watch me speak on 90s Turkish pop & economic inequality here (in Turkish), or read about my quantitative analysis of 90s Turkish pop music here (in Turkish).