Welcome! I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Boston College. My research bridges collective behavior and social movements, political sociology, organizational studies, computational social science, and quantitative methods, with a regional focus on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

At the heart of my work is understanding how contentious politics emerge from the strategic interactions of diverse actors, state institutions, oil companies as organizational actors, civil society organizations, and local communities. My dissertation introduces petroprotest, protests concerning the production, consumption, or impacts of oil and gas. It develops the petro field framework, a contested arena where states, companies, and communities continually renegotiate the stakes, rules, and meanings of oil. Drawing on field theory, my work offers a multilevel perspective examining how corporate governance structures, ownership arrangements (National Oil Companies versus International Oil Companies), and spatial proximity to oil infrastructure shape protest dynamics.

Methodologically, I use computational text analysis, geospatial modeling, survey experiments, regression analysis, and comparative-historical analysis to examine sociopolitical and contentious dynamics. I have designed and implemented original surveys in Iraq, analyzed global protest events across 160 countries, and constructed novel datasets on state-led mobilization in Iran.

My research has been published in Comparative Political Studies and Alzheimer’s Disease & Associated Disorders, with additional papers currently under review at American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, and Comparative Political Studies. My policy analyses have appeared in Foreign Affairs and Middle East Report Online.

Please find my full CV here (last updated November 2025).