I am a Democracy and Development Research Fellow with the OSUN University Network at the Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town. Previously, I was SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto in the Department of Political Science. I received my PhD in Government from Cornell in 2022 focusing on the political economy of land and elections in Africa.
My book project - “A Grain of Maize” focuses on land redistribution and restitution in post-apartheid South Africa. In it, I show that questions of supply determine when and where land redistribution occurs related to both rural segregation and variation within a sector’s agricultural institutions. This work builds off of my dissertation, which received an Honourable Mention for the 2023 African Politics Conference Group Best Dissertation Prize.
My other research has looked into issues of accountability, land politics and ethnicity in Kenya's new county governments, the politics of experiments and election violence in Liberia, and a project to define the settler state within the African colonial context.