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, where I also serve as Director of the Middle East Center and Chair of the M.A. in Middle East Studies. 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 M.A. in Economics (2014) from Duke University. You can read my CV here.
My research lies at the intersection of comparative political economy, Middle East politics, and historical political economy. I am broadly interested in how economic, social, and ethnoreligious inequalities shape political institutions and behavior, and how states and citizens respond to these inequalities. My work focuses in particular on (i) the politics of economic inequality, redistribution, and taxation; (ii) distributive politics and public service provision; and (iii) the political economy of state-building and nation-making in diverse societies. A growing part of my research examines how states respond to economically powerful ethnoreligious minorities and how fiscal and economic policies can be used to reshape the composition of national elites. Geographically, my work spans advanced industrialized countries and the Middle East, with a particular focus on Turkey and the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world.
My work has been published or is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics, World Politics, Socio-Economic Review, and Political Behavior, among other journals. I am also working on two book projects. Triaging Responsivenes, is under advance contract with Cambridge Elements in Political Economy. My second project, Homogenizing High Street: Wealthy Minorities and the Economic Foundations of Nation-Building, examines how states respond when ethnoreligious minorities hold disproportionate economic power and how economic repression can become a tool of nation-building.
My research has received several awards from sections of the American Political Science Association, including the APSA MENA Politics Section Best Article Award (2023), the Weber Best Paper in Religion and Politics Award (2024), the Best Paper on Social and Economic Inequality Award (2024), and the APSA MENA Politics Section Best Paper Award (2025 and 2026).
I am a Faculty Fellow at the Association for Analytic Learning about Islam and Muslim Societies (AALIMS). I also serve on the board of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC) and on the editorial board of the Journal of Historical Political Economy. At UW, I am affiliated with the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, the Center for Environmental Politics, and Near and Middle Eastern Studies.
Besides my research, I teach courses on comparative politics, political economy, economic inequality, Middle East politics, Turkish politics, historical political economy, political geography, and geospatial methods. I also advise graduate students in Political Science and Middle East Studies.
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).