I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. I study American elections and voting behavior, polarization, public opinion, and local political economy. I also research in the areas of political psychology, politics and religion, and racial and ethnic politics. My work has been published or is forthcoming in Science, the American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Research Quarterly, American Politics Research, the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, and Politics, Groups, and Identities. 

I am a 2026 Andrew Carnegie Fellow working on a book project, An Epidemic of Terror: Polarization, Attacks on Places of Worship, and Democratic Equality. This project combines qualitative interviews, historical analysis, electoral and geographic data, and original survey experimental data to investigate how attacks on Black Churches (as well as synagogues, mosques, and other churches) since 1950 reveal racial and religious dimensions of contemporary polarization and pathways to depolarize through local solidaristic networks of support aided by informational and affective interventions.

In May 2022, I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, where I was affiliated with the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy and the Institute for Latino Studies. For the 2023 academic year, I was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy and the Department of Political Science, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

My research has been funded by the Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellowship with the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and by the Religion & Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. I am also a collaborator on the Strengthening Democracy Challenge, a collaborative project bringing together academics, practitioners, and industry experts to identify and test “interventions to improve Americans’ commitment to democratic principles of political engagement.” The project has been covered by PBS Newshour, Nature, the New York Times, the Monkey Cage, and The Atlantic.

I completed my M.A. in Political Science at Notre Dame in 2019. I also hold a M.Div. from Duke University (2016) and a B.A. in Politics and Religion from Washington & Lee University (2013). Before beginning my doctoral studies, I worked as a case manager and employment specialist with CWS, a refugee resettlement agency, in Durham, NC.

My first book project, The Politics of Trauma: Mass Tragedies in Polarized America, examines 1) how different types of mass tragedies impact mass political behavior, 2) how polarization has driven American political parties to respond to traumatic events in increasingly divergent ways, and 3) why the mass public expects different political and partisan responses for different types of traumatic events.

You can learn more about my professional and educational background from my CV.