I am an interdisciplinary scholar of contemporary American politics with a focus on the US military institution and international peace and security agendas. I am currently a Visiting Scholar at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Bern and an Associate Researcher at the University of Basel. I have an MA in Political Science and a PhD in American Studies, both from New York University, and held a postdoctoral fellowship in Global American Studies at Harvard University.
My research focuses on the logics and management of difference for US state and military power. Bridging the fields of American Studies, US Politics, and International Relations, my work analyzes twenty-first century US military and security institutions and agendas, focusing on social difference as both a site of domestic governance and a modality for extending the global reach of US state power. My research advances the study of contemporary US politics by continuing to center the US military as a central site to understand the political and institutional impact of inclusion, diversity, and difference in the twilight of US liberal empire.
After relocating from New York to Switzerland in 2016, I held a position as a senior researcher and program officer at swisspeace, a peacebuilding organization, where I conducted policy-oriented research on gender, human rights, and counterterrorism. After winning a highly competitive 1.3 million CHF (1.7 million USD) PRIMA grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, I ran the Gender, War, and Security Research Group at the University of Basel and served as the PI on a project on the logics of gender and race that structure the global Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) agenda, as well as the diffusion of US state power through violence prevention work that depends on the affective labor of communities impacted by US militarism.